FOLLOWING two crushing defeats to the top teams in the region, Gilas Pilipinas coach Tim Cone is now considering making changes to the team’s offense.
Cone, for much of his career a disciple of the triangle offense, said he is weighing the possibility after Gilas succumbed to a 93-66 setback to Australia on Sunday to fall to 2-2 in their FIBA Basketball World Cup 2027 Asian Qualifiers.
REAd Australia peppers Gilas with second-half treys in 27-point win
“It’s back to the drawing board a little bit,” said Cone during Sunday’s postgame press conference after the defeat against Australia. “I think we’ve gonna have to take a look a little bit at our offense and maybe try to simplify things a little more."
Ever since he took over the Gilas position, Cone has been mostly running the triangle offense, although the national team coach noticeably deviated from his system in a couple of stretches during the games against New Zealand and Australia.
Cone said the change is being considered after Gilas was unable to generate offense especially from three-point range on a consistent basis.
Gilas firing blanks
Against Australia, Gilas shot just 29 percent from behind the arc on a 9-of-31 clip on Sunday. The output was much worst last Thursday when the shot only 19 percent, at 7-of-37 to be exact, in the loss to New Zealand.
Gilas wasn’t finding the range even in the victories in the World Cup qualifiers. It was only 4-of-16 and 6-of-19 from behind the arc during the first two games against Guam during the November window, both won convincingly.
“We got shooters. I think everybody complains about our team that we have. We have Dwight. We got Juan. We got Justin. We got KQ. And Calvin. We have the shooters on the team. We are just not generating the shots that we want to generate. It’s not about the shots going in or out. It’s about getting the quality of shots.
“And that’s what I said when I talked about we have to kinda look at what we are doing, maybe simplify it a little bit more so that we can get a little bit more open looks. But I don’t think there’s any problem with our shooting. We just haven’t shot the ball well,” said Cone.
Cone said Australia was just the better team despite Gilas' solid showing in the first half, especially on the defensive end.
“It was a very painful one,” Cone said. “It was (a) very painful second half. It was painful to be part of. Painful to watch especially being in front of our home crowd. We want to be better than that.
“I thought we played a really good, we did everything that we want defensively. We held guys down. But when they started to stretch the lead a little bit, got some open threes, and a couple of turnovers on our part, I think we just got deflated and lost our energy. It was hard to chase those guys,” Cone added.
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