THE message pinged on my phone at 3:47 a.m. on Monday here in Chicago, nearly four hours after the Gilas Pilipinas disaster.
The text came from coach Tim Cone, who tried to make sense of the 44-point loss to China which eliminated Gilas Pilipinas from the 2026 Asian Games.
READ PBA chief left searching for answers after horror loss to China
Realizing that he was coming from a place of frustration, I gave his misgivings a decent amount of appropriate tolerance.
Except for a couple of points.
“We brought some really good players, but we didn’t bring our best players,” Cone said as he lamented the absences of Kai Sotto and Dwight Ramos et al in the lineup.
I’m sure Cone didn’t mean any disrespect but this sounds like a slap on the faces of those who wore the Gilas uniform in Nagoya.
Gratirude should be the only word bouncing off that badly beaten locker room, not wishful remarks on who weren’t there and why.
SOME WORDS ARE BETTER LEFT UNSAID.
This type of musing comes off as insensitive and should have been muttered privately.
It’s like wrapping lukewarm arms around the wife or girlfriend while trlling her about your fantasies about the luscious, curvaceous Ivana Alawi.
It’s not only foul, it’s flagrant.
Cone also railed at how “it’s not an easy process to naturalize players like it is in other countries.”
Wasting saliva on a task that is for the federation to worry about is a misuse of energy that reflects desperation.
Speaking of the federation, where’s the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) in all of this?
Why is it so deafeningly quiet amid the noisy social media storm that followed our ill-fated title defense that demoted Gilas from champs to chomps in ninth place?
LACK OF PRIORITY?
How much effort was exerted to secure the services of Kai Sotto, who was available after his attempt to play college ball appeared to have died on arrival at the US NCAA doorstep?
I don’t think Gilas could easily beat that lanky, spunky Chinese squad even with Kai, but they sure would not have lost by 44 and would probably maul Korea in the quarters.
And where was Justin Brownlee?
How serious are his injuries and why insist on waiting for him instead of plotting for a replacement?
My inclination is to believe in the theory that the Asian Games intramurals weren’t taken as seriously as those more glamorous FIBA qualifying windows.
But with the SBP opting to go mute, we will never truly know.
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