GILAS Pilipinas coach Tim Cone won’t take the moral victory after his squad came close to a victory over New Zealand on Thursday in the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2027 Asian Qualifiers.
The Philippines lost to the Tall Blacks, 69-66, but it did put up a gallant fight as the game was deadlock at 37-37 at the half, before Gilas made a last ditch comeback that ended with Dwight Ramos missing a three in the final seconds which would've sent the game to overtime.
READ: Strong, disciplined New Zealand survives last-gasp Gilas comeback
Cone, however, is looking at the results. And the result simply just didn't go their way - late fight back or not.
“I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’m happy with our performance,” said Cone to open the postgame press conference.
“But the bottom line, we are not going to take any pride in almost winning or making the game close or whatever. We showed up to win and we didn’t do that tonight."
Cone also lauded New Zealand for an excellent defensive game that led to their struggles on offense which countered the positives that Gilas showed in the game including the play of their bigs in Quentin Millora-Brown and AJ Edu.
“There were certain parts of the game where I thought we did well. We defended well. We competed on the board. I thought our big guys, Q and AJ played real well," Cone said.
"I hate saying that we didn’t make shots because there is more to the game than just making shots. That’s an easy explanation. But if you are saying that, just because you are not getting good shots, and we didn’t get the shots that we wanted.
We didn’t get the flow that we wanted. Credit goes to them because they defended well as well."
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