Christian Standhardinger was all alone in Ginebra’s sorry 103-91 loss in Game 2 of their PBA Philippine Cup best-of-seven semifinal battle against Meralco on Sunday night, May 19.

Though thankful to have had the trust of his teammates and coaches to shoot all over the floor, Standhardinger understands that it’s not enough to capture an entire series and cushion the blow of the defeat.

The 34-year-old big man’s career-best 41-point performance couldn’t power the Kings entirely, with the Bolts’ balanced attack eventually equalizing the series.

With Standhardinger’s fine showing working against the Kings, which was exactly the Bolts’ scheme in its Game 2 fightback, the 15-time champion team might need to go back to its roots of equal effort.

“I’m sure coach Tim [Cone], he saw that and he knows what’s going on. The help was not coming so I just kept being aggressive. So eventually, I think in the first game, the help was coming, so I passed it out. It’s that decision of the coaches to make adjustment after adjustment after adjustment. Hopefully we will get the next victory in the series again,” said Standhardinger.

“Meralco is a very solid team. They have grind it out players. They have a bunch of guys there that affect the winning a lot. It’s always hard to play against teams with guys like that,” he added.

The two-time Best Player of the Conference actually finished with a double-double as he tallied a team-high 11 rebounds of Ginebra's 39 that didn't make any significant difference in the final that saw Meralco come up with 50.

In the end, it was purely just an overall better display from Meralco, which avoided a total collapse in the endgame following Ginebra's third-quarter blast on the back of Standhardinger.

Still, the 6-foot-8 big insisted that the Kings showed up with a lot of physicality and intensity despite what the results suggest.

“It’s always hard to pinpoint certain things and say whether we were physical or not. Even if you see that we get out rebounded, you’d think that the other team was more physical," Standhardinger said.

"But I know my guys and we played very physically. Next game we'll play with the same physicality because players are always one hundred percent there’s no more or less physical, it’s just always one hundred percent.

"Now if we outrebounded them, people will say we played more physical. I do believe, especially when it gets to the playoffs, everybody’s one hundred percent of their outputs, efforts, and physicality," he concluded.