BY REYNALD MAGALLON
Gilas Pilipinas is under no illusions that it can already take on some of Europe’s bests despite coming away with a 74-64 victory against the Taiwan Mustangs in their send-off friendly match on Monday, June 24 at the PhilSports Arena.
In fact, if there’s one takeaway Gilas head coach Tim Cone had after the game – it was the opposite – that the Nationals are still way far from they want to be and there’s still a lot of work ahead of them with less than two weeks left before the Olympic Qualifying tournament next month.
“We got a lot of work to do ahead of us,” Cone’s frank assessment of his squad which managed to pull away in the second half and led by as many as 17 points but not after a rough first half that was highlighted by some stretches of scoring droughts in the second quarter.
Gilas actually had a hard time figuring out their point of attacks on the offensive end and took time to finally put the clamps down on defense especially with the Mustangs’ mammoth 7-foot-6 Sam Deguara lording over the paint.
But Cone was nowhere disappointed. For one, he was pleased that they got to face such challenges and identify their rooms for improvement.
“Well you know, we weren’t concerned about winning or losing a basketball game, we wanted to play a certain style. And I think they did a really good job of throwing a lot of jump defenses at us. zones, box and ones—things that we haven’t been prepared for because we’re only been practicing for three days,” said Cone.
“Deguara, the big guy, was a load for everybody. Took a lot of space up offensively, took a lot of space up defensively and really caused us some problems. But this is exactly what we need, we need it to be hard. We didn’t want it to be easy. If it’s easy, it’s not gonna help us. This is what’s hard and we’re happy it was hard,” he added.
The Gilas mentor, however, believes that his charges could only get better from there especially that they still have two friendly games against Poland and Turkey to develop and test themselves ahead of their looming clashes against Latvia and Georgia in OQT.
“We’ll just continue to get better and better as we move forward. Obviously, I mean, for this day, it wasn’t pretty. We gotta be better. That’s why we have these games.Practicing and playing friendlies so we could get ready,” he stressed.
