Gilas Pilipinas head coach Tim Cone remained steadfast in his decision not to mess with the current pool of national players heading to forthcoming international competitions even as Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas president Al S. Panlilio lauded the strides taken by the Philippines in the recent FIBA Olympic Qualifiers in Riga, Latvia.
“We fell short but I am still very proud of the team,” said Panlilio. “We can compete with the top ranked teams in the world but yes we need to get better and get over the hump.”
“We continue to learn from our losses and continue to improve.”
Cone plans to get over the hump using basically the same batch of players who shocked world No. 6 Latvia in the OQT, made it to the semifinals against Georgia, and led by double figures against Brazil in the first half before fading.
“To be honest, absolutely not,” said Cone in response to a question that raised the possibility of reinforcing the roster during a noontime media conference last Monday, July 15, at the Cignal studio of the TV5 Media Center in Mandaluyong.
If there will be no changes — in the absence of injuries like the ones that sidelined Scottie Thompson, Jamie Malonzo and AJ Edu — the national pool will still have Justin Brownlee, Kai Sotto, Dwight Ramos, June Mar Fajardo, Chris Newsome, CJ Perez, Calvin Oftana, Carl Tamayo, Kevin Quiambao, Malonzo, Thompson and Edu coming out of the gates, with Japeth Aguilar and Mason Amos as alternates.
Cone went with 11 players in Riga after Thompson came down with a back injury.
Citing the importance of familiarity by the players with the triangle offense and the intricacies of his defensive philosophy, Cone said adding one or two players to the roster could drag the program, painstakingly put together from the start of training months ago, back to square one.
“Because of the short preparation time we have, the teaching part of the team is much harder when you have a big pool. If you have 18 guys on your team, you have to teach all 18 your system. And it gets very unwieldy and difficult to do that especially if you are only talking about 10 days or seven days,” said Cone.
“If you’ve got a whole season, a whole year season to teach 18 guys, you can teach 18 easily over a period of time. But with short preparation time, it’s like if you are going to teach five people how to do something, you can do it quickly.
“But if you are going to teach 25 people to do something, it takes a longer time to teach all 25. And that’s an exaggeration. But that kind of what the program is all about; that’s why we try to go with a tight, smaller pool because the teaching is less, and it has to be because the preparation time is less.”
Even as preparations could soon be underfoot with the looming FIBA November window where Gilas will take on the New Zealand Tall Blacks on the 21st and Hong Kong on the 24th both at the SM MOA Arena, Cone was quick to put the brakes on speculations regarding two new players acquired by his PBA team Barangay Ginebra San Miguel — center Isaac Go via a trade and playmaker RJ Abarrientos with the No. 3 pick in the Rookie Draft.
“That’s a long way away right now. And again, [Abarrientos is] a young guy. He could be [in the pool] three or four years from now, but you don’t know what the (Gilas) team’s [composition is] gonna be (in the future),” Cone said.
“Isaac [on the other hand] is a big man at 6-7” in the PBA, but he’s not a big man on the world stage. I mean, you can’t take his level and take him to Europe and make him play 6-10, 6-11 guys there. He’s gonna be overwhelmed. He’s just not big enough.”
Team chemistry which comes from playing together long enough, Cone believes, cannot be less stressed in moving on from the OQT, especially after Gilas, using a core culled from the FIBA World Cup, came tantalizingly close to securing a ticket to the Paris Olympic Games.
“That’s basically the challenge. If you bring somebody on the team, somebody has to be removed. Right now, the chemistry is strong. These are really, really difficult decisions,” said Cone.
“But really, we will try to stick to the 12 because we already have a history with the 12. We have preparation with those 12. Like we keep on saying, it’s cumulative. Every time we bring in someone new, we have to start from this point and go forward,” he added.
“All in the past won’t mean much if we continue to change players. We want to keep the players as we can as we are accumulating experiences together.”