Bay Area head coach Brian Goorjian remained wary of Ginebra import Justin Brownlee ahead of their best-of-seven Finals affair which will fire off on Christmas Day on Sunday, Dec. 25, at Mall of Asia Arena.

Goorjian revealed that he actually got a warning from Brownlee’s coach in college about how great of a basketball player the resident Ginebra import is but still the Dragons received a beating at the hands of the Kings.

And it was Brownlee who spearheaded that rout with a scintillating 46-point performance, giving Bay Area its first taste of defeat in the Philippine shore.

“They obviously got a great team but Brownlee ran wild that night and everybody is talking about the 46 points. One of my bestfriends coached Brownlee in college at St. Johns and gave me a heads up that he is a hell of a man and a hell of a player and we experienced that in that game,” shared the Australian head coach who won six championships in the NBL and steered the Boomers to a bronze medal finish in the Tokyo Olympics.

Now that Bay Area is meeting Ginebra and Brownlee at least for four straight games, Goorjian hopes they have developed into a more cohesive unit to put on a collective effort to stop not just Brownlee but the rest of the Kings and avoid suffering the same beating they had in the eliminations.

“That was the start of the problem. So there were a lot of avenues we needed to get better at but it's something that I hoped that we progressed over the course leading into this,” said Goorjian.

“They are a great basketball team and the cornerstones of the game, getting back on defense, rebounding, controlling their halfcourt, those were the things we gonna have to be polished at in order to win this series,” he added.

Still, Goorjian is leaving it all to his players to execute their game plan to take down the mighty Kings.

“The players, they go out there and play and we got our gameplan and see where it take us.”