By: Ryan Alba
LA Tenorio’s flexibility is enduring.
In his 20s and early 30s with Alaska, Tenorio operated as a floor general whose very presence dictated his team’s halfcourt offense. His first two seasons with Barangay Ginebra saw his usage get dialed down to accommodate other talented guards like Sol Mercado and Stanley Pringle. Now at 37 years young, Tenorio is having his best passing season since 2014 playing alongside the best passing import of his generation — and possibly of all time — in Justin Brownlee, as well as Scottie Thompson, the do-it-all guard who continues to refine his playmaking chops as the conferences pass.
Tailoring his game to play beside other talented playmakers has led to some significant success. One step back for a peek at the big picture reveals five titles with Ginebra, but a closer look reveals the competence in which he shape-shifts at the guard spot just to tilt the scales in favor the Gin Kings. A fine example: his play in Game 1 of the 2021 PBA Governors’ Cup semifinals, where he helped carve out the NLEX defense alongside Thompson and Brownlee to give Ginebra a 95-86 win for a 1-0 series lead
Make no mistake, Tenorio is still deadly by himself. His court vision is still intact and his hoops savvy has only increased with time. Tenorio can, and will, carve defenses up in the pick and roll. He’s one of the few players in the country who can utilize screens at all three levels – by scoring himself, passing to the roller, and reading the help to make the right pass.
NLEX decided to play drop coverage against Tenorio, and it didn’t end well for them. Drop coverage is when the big man shadows the ball handler and drops toward the rim, and its main weakness is that as the perimeter defender gets caught by the screen and the big defender drops back, there’s an exploitable gap in the midrange. Tenorio exploited the hell out of those gaps for six of his 19 points. The last clip is a bit of a show, but the principle of taking advantage of the gap remains the same:
He can also play the big defender on a fiddle and provide the roller/popper the space needed to score. Here, Brownlee slipped the screen and Tenorio dusted off Matt Nieto. Cameron Clark had to decide who to guard, and once he settled in on Tenorio, a pass came towards Brownlee for the triple:
Tenorio doesn’t limit the pick and roll to a two-man game. With him, it’s a 10-person affair where he memorizes where his teammates are and reads the rotations of the defense. Here, Christian Standhardinger sets a butt screen (which is actually a distinct type of screen with its own set of pros and cons) for Tenorio. There’s a tagger waiting for Standhardinger’s roll and Clark keeps pace with him. He notices Don Trollano inch closer towards him, and it’s a kickout for Arvin Tolentino who attacks the closeout and scores:
Outside of his PnR wizardry, Tenorio found success against NLEX playing off of Brownlee and Thompson. He was given space to shoot and create because of the amount of pressure Ginebra’s two other playmakers put on the defense, and he thrived en route to 19 points and six assists.
There’s the vanilla stuff where he knocks down open jumpers after Thompson or Brownlee get crowded by the NLEX defense. Tenorio has shot 36.2% from deep since 2015, a mark that’s roughly 6-7 percentage points higher than league average. The amount of panic teams display when Brownlee drives or when Thompson touches the ball is readily apparent. In the first clip, Brownlee dribbling made the weakside defenders cheat hard, and they were punished for it. In the second, the kickout to Thompson resulted in miscommunication between the NLEX players and the defense broke down:
When people think of skills that scale well next to good teammates, we think of shooting and ball movement. The classic way of thinking is that players who tend to dribble don’t fit well next to other dribble-heavy players because there’s only one ball, and only one player can pound the air out of the ball at a time. Though there is some truth to that, modern offense isn’t just isolations where one dude dribbles it out for 20 seconds before shooting or passing for a bailout. Teams run several actions to tilt defenses (force rotations) and get an advantage for points. Having multiple capable ball handlers on a team allows you to have a bevy of players who can take advantage of these advantages or expand on them for better looks. (A good model to see this at work would be the 2021 Los Angeles Clippers who reached the Western Conference Finals trotting out lineups with Paul George, Kawhi Leonard, Reggie Jackson, Rajon Rondo, Patrick Beverley, and Nic Batum all sharing playmaking and ball-handling duties.)
In this one, Thompson drives to the rim and four blue shirts surround him. He kicks it out to Tenorio, who now faces a tilted defense. Tenorio beats the close out and forces the defense to rotate anew. Seeing the rotations, he drops a laydown pass to Japeth Aguilar for the slam. Thompson driving spooked the NLEX defense which gave Tenorio the driving lane to make the play possible. This is how ball handling can mesh well with ball handling and create easy offense for your team:
This time, he plays off of Brownlee. Nieto leaves Tenorio alone on the wing to wall up against Brownlee; NLEX doesn’t want him to drive down the middle of the floo, so Nieto and JR Quinahan literally build a wall at the free-throw line to shut down the driving lane and force him to give the ball up or move right, where Philip Paniamogan is also preemptively helping. Brownlee makes the easy pass to Tenorio and once again, he kills the closeout. With Nieto running at him, he moves toward the opposite direction using the younger Atenean’s forward momentum against him. Quinahan doesn’t want to fully commit and leave Brownlee open, and it’s a bucket:
Now, Thompson gets two feet in the paint, forcing Kris Rosales to leave Tenorio and help. This leaves Kevin Alas splitting in charge of Jeff Chan and Tenorio. Alas ends up being in no man’s land, practically guarding no one. Thompson and Aguilar seal their men, and Tenorio gets an open layup. His handles are good enough still to break his man down one-on-one, but having other playmakers scramble the defense before the ball even gets to him allows him to get easy looks against already beaten defenses.
The fun thing about having multiple advantage creators is that they all benefit from each other. It’s not just Tenorio that gets lifted by Brownlee and Thompson – they all gain something.
It’s best illustrated in this possession. In an effort to get the ball out of LA’s hands, NLEX blitzes him in the pick and roll. This leaves the rest of Ginebra with a 4-versus-3 advantage. Even worse for NLEX, it’s Justin Brownlee on the short roll. He quickly finds Thompson after Trollano rotates, and it’s an open corner triple for Scottie.
In a proper scheme, playmaking (ball handling, creation, and all that) is additive. Having multiple guys that can force help is beneficial for a team’s offense. Turning an advantage creator like Tenorio into a player who punishes advantages created by other advantage creators is a nightmare for opposing teams. Think about it like this: a player that can punish set defenses will punish tilted defenses more. Having guys who can wreak havoc makes it easier for others to wreak havoc as well.
Tenorio has adapted well, fitting like a glove next to Thompson and Brownlee. He can still lead the offense for stretches and beat teams himself, but having those two make life so much easier for him and the rest of the team. He’s transformed what he does on the floor, and it’s led to really good results this conference playing off of talented playmakers. NLEX didn’t have an answer for Brownlee, and its answer for Thompson led to Tenorio posing new questions to answer. In short, the Gin Kings are tough to guard – and Tenorio is a huge reason why.
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