WHEN the draw for the International Basketball Federation (Fiba) Asia Championship preliminary round was announced last week, there was a ripple of excitement that ran through the Filipino basketball faithful. The Philippines, in Group B, where Palestine and Kuwait stand as its strongest opponents, is considered to be in an easy bracket.
The country’s long, agonizing chase for an Olympic basketball slot, whose futility has stretched to almost half a century, seems about to come to a glorious fruition. This would appear as the logical implication of that easy draw—but not so fast, says Tom Baldwin, coach of Gilas Pilipinas.
To this veteran international mentor, whose last stint on the Gilas Pilipinas bench was as a consultant to Chot Reyes, back in 2013 when the Filipinos famously fell to Iran in the Fiba Asia gold medal game, the draw is “fairly irrelevant.”
It is, after all, only for the preliminary group. His team is too good not to make it past this stage. What counts more is when Gilas moves into the more difficult rounds where, it can be assumed with certainty, the rest of the field would be as hungry as we are, would be as tough as we are, and, perhaps—my greatest nightmare, which is the nightmare of my generation—would be more prepared and better trained than we are.
At stake in this championship is the gold medal, which automatically guarantees the winner automatic qualification to next year’s Olympic Games in Brazil. The silver and bronze holders would have to go through another round of qualifying series against similar losers in the other zones to try to qualify.
Let’s face it, the Fiba Asia Championship is set for a late September launch. It is already early July, and some of the best of our boys are still out there, chasing a championship in a Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) conference reinforced by imports.
The earliest they could come together, assuming the names of the Magic Twelve would be out in three weeks, would be around the third week of July. That gives Gilas Pilipinas two months at the most, and this is a generous projection, to prepare for so important a tournament as an Olympic qualifying round.
Forget about the conditioning, the skill level and the determination. The Filipinos would have it. But would two months be enough to turn Gilas into a team? Teamwork, historically, has been an elusive element in any Philippine five, as elusive as that Olympic slot we are chasing.
We’ve great individual players, but getting them to play like clockwork, as the sum total of the small parts, was almost impossible. Always, time was not on our side. Whether it is Chot Reyes or Tom Baldwin, the length of training is a highly relevant factor, and in a tournament as highly contested as this one, it may be the deciding factor.
It is safe to assume that China’s youth-laden crew that performed miserably in Manila in 2013 would be back as more polished and more skilled players. South Korea and Japan are not known to cram, knowing how similarly highly prized this Olympic slot is to either.
Same thing could be said about Iran, the gold medalist last time, as well as the other Middle Eastern powers, whose size, speed and skills level have tremendously gone up.
If asked now to name what would be our distinct advantage in this tournament, I can see none. Baldwin may outthink and outwit the others, but a game plan could only be as good as its elements, the players and their teamwork.
Baldwin’s run to turn this team into something better than its predecessor started months ago. A key revelation to how he would conduct things surfaced in last month’s Southeast Asian Games, where he piloted the Gilas boys to the gold. An unconvincing gold.
In this long-suffering nation of basketball fanatics, Baldwin has Most Valuable Player’s resources and a slew of PBA talents, plus a reinvigorated Andray Blatche, the naturalized Filipino to pull it off. He told us about his goal—“it is really to win the gold”—but not how he would do it.
My hope lies somewhere between dreaming the impossible and expecting the inevitable. Having lived with a generation that watched the last Philippine team to play in Olympic basketball—in Munich in 1972—it may come as a shock to the young ones that we’re now into our fifth decade of Olympic exile.
A year before that, in the ABC, the predecessor of Fiba Asia, we hurdled the Koreans, in a game where Freddie Webb had a defensive gem against the great Shin Dong-pa, and Yoyong Martirez, Bogs Adornado and Danny Florencio delivered the killer blows down the stretch.
There was something unforgettable, too, about that tournament, and when I remember it, I shudder at the thought that in this age of towering players, sticky defense and three-point shooting, it could happen again. It was Japan’s 93-69 massacre of the Filipinos, as unthinkable then as it is now.
Afterward, at Yoyogi Stadium, that “architectural marvel” from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, rocked with the chants of the victors, the Japanese coach, Kasahara, went on to boast, “We could have beaten them, even if we were blindfolded!”
Such surprises are not remote in this upcoming Fiba Asia championship in Changshia, China. Baldwin has said, “I’ve been in so many of these tournaments and there are always surprises. I don’t want to be in those surprises…. We have to go and we have to play.”
Play hard, win hard, die hard. And let’s get to Rio de Janeiro next year!