By REYNALD MAGALLON
Barangay Ginebra swept the top individual honors in the PBA Season 50 Commissioner’s Cup as RJ Abarrientos copped his very first Best Player of the Conference award while Justin Brownlee claimed his fourth Best Import plum before the start of Game 4 of the Finals at the Smart Araneta Coliseum on Wednesday, June 10.
The Kings playmaker bested perennial winner June Mar Fajardo of San Miguel, Robert Bolick of NLEX, Ricci Rivero of Phoenix and Jerrick Ahanmisi for the plum, amassing a total of 1,147 points built on 462 points from the statistics,93 points from the players and 592 points the media regularly covering the PBA games.
Abarrientos, who won the Rookie of the Year honors last season and bagged the BPC award in just his second season, was the favorite to win the award after Ginebra reach as far as the finals while Fajardo’s SMB and Bolick’s NLEX failed to go past the quarterfinals.
Bolick was a far second in the race with 804 points — 483 points from the stats, 227 from the media and 44 from player votes while Fajardo came in third with 573 points — 480 coming from the stats, 53 from the media and 40 from the players
Interestingly, his uncle, Johnny Abarrientos, who now serves as an assistant coach for the Kings also won his first BPC award in the Commissioner’s Cup in the 1996 season.
Brownlee, on the other hand, as expected ran away with his fourth Best Import award with a total of 1,264 points. The resident Kings import got 593 points from the statistics, 560 points from the media votes and 111 from players votes.
Brownlee last won the Best Import award in the 2023 Commissioner’s Cup and he has now won the second most number of such awards at four, behind Bobby Ray Parks Sr. ‘s seven.
His closest pursuer was Rain or Shine import Jaylen Johnson with 888 points, followed by TNT reinforcement Chris McCullough with 690 points and Meralco import Patrick Gardner with 534 points.
Interestingly, only Brownlee and Johnson were the only remaining imports from the original choices of the teams at the start of the conference.
