San Miguel Beer and Barangay Ginebra flaunted their playoff pedigree in their respective opening wins.

But they are far from satisfied.

The Beermen and the Kings are still looking to fine-tune their game plans as they gun for a 2-0 semis lead in their best-of-seven affair in the 2024 PBA Philippine Cup at the Mall of Asia Arena on Sunday, May 19.

Ginebra battles Meralco anew in the first offering at 3 p.m. while SMB faces off against Rain or Shine in the second game at 6:15 p.m.

While it’s nice to win the first game against their familiar rival, Kings head coach is refusing to get too carried away by the victory, believing that they are far from where they want to be and there’s still a lot of games ahead of them.

“It's a long series. There’s a lot of  games ahead of us. It’s just nice to get the first one out of the way as it is in a series you always want to get that one. You put the other team on the reactive basis  but the bottomline is it’s just one game,” said Cone after Ginebra drew first blood with a 92-88 win in Game 1.

The multi-titled tactician certainly knows what he’s talking about especially with Meralco proving to have that capability to pull the rug from under Ginebra if not for the vintage performance and late game heroics of Stanley Pringle who fired a season-high 22 points.

Cone said they also have a lot to fix with their defense as they hope to get accustomed to defending against coach Nenad Vucinic's system with Meralco.

“Their system is a lot different and we struggled with it at times but because it gets a lot of movement their guard quick to the rim and we have a hard time defending in stretches and hopefully we get better and better as the series goes along,” added Cone.

The same thought was what SMB head coach Jorge Gallent had after his team’s 101-98 escape over Rain or Shine.

The one-time champion coach underscored the importance of limiting their errors after they turned the ball over 16 times in Game 1.

“We just have to minimize our turnovers. Look, we had 16 and that’s really a lot for a team so they just took advantage of that. If we commit turnovers they will just run, run and run,” said Gallent, wary of giving ROS momentum that would fuel their run-and-gun offense.

Good thing, June Mar Fajardo took over for the Beermen with a double-double of 23 points and 11 rebounds as they survived a young and feisty Elasto Painters in the endgame.