GILAS Pilipinas head coach Tim Cone admitted the team was disappointed after opening its Asian Games campaign with an 89-85 loss to Bahrain on Friday, but stressed that the Philippines must quickly move forward.
Cone said Gilas fell short of its own expectations and believes the team is capable of producing a much better performance in its succeeding games.
“We’re very disappointed in the way we played. We expect a lot more out of ourselves,” Cone said during the postgame press conference posted on PBA Rush’s Facebook page.
The coach, however, emphasized that the defeat was only the team’s first game of the tournament and there was little value in dwelling on the setback.
“At some point you can be disappointed only long enough, you’ve got to move on. So, you know, this is only the first game of the tournament, so we’ve got to move on,” he said.
Cone also pointed to several positive numbers from the game.
Gilas won the rebounding battle and finished with more assists, while getting around 19 additional shot attempts compared with Bahrain.
“Usually you look at those stats alone, then you would think that we had won the basketball game,” Cone said.
The bigger problem, according to Cone, was Gilas’ difficulty defending Bahrain’s bigger players.
Despite winning the boards, the Philippines struggled to contain Bahrain’s size, forcing its defenders to collapse on the big men. That created opportunities for Bahrain either to score inside or find open shooters beyond the arc.
“We had a hard time with their size, even though we won the rebound, we had a hard time defending their size,” Cone said. “And so we couldn’t cover both.”
Cone nevertheless credited his players for using their quickness and effort to compete on the boards despite being undersized.
Moving forward, the coach said Gilas needs to improve its shooting while getting more players involved offensively.
“If we can continue to do that and then shoot the ball a little better and get everybody more involved, then I think we can be successful this tournament,” Cone said.
Gilas will try to secure its first win when it faces Kazakhstan on Saturday night. (Adrian Co)
