CHEMISTRY will be the key for this youthful Gilas Pilipinas squad as it wages war in the November window of the 2021 Fiba Asia Cup qualifiers in Manama.
Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) program director Tab Baldwin indicated that the cohesion between these young stars will be crucial in the Philippines' success as they brace for a tough series of games in Bahrain.
"With such a young and inexperienced team, we're really looking at chemistry more than we are trying to develop any sort of complex tactical system," he said.
"We have a very diverse group of players and players who don't have very much experience in international level. We've been spending our time here in the bubble really trying to introduce some concepts that we expect to have to confront with Thailand, eventually Indonesia, and Korea, and also to just make these players understand that there are new combinations of which they're not used to, and hopefully we can gain some familiarity for we won't have any preparation games."
Gilas is trotting out the cream of the crop in the collegiate ranks, with University of the Philippines stars Kobe Paras and Juan Gomez de Liano, and La Salle center Justine Baltazar leading the charge.
Also part of the roster are special Gilas draftees Isaac Go, Rey Suerte, Allyn Bulanadi, and twins Matt and Mike Nieto, as well as Dwight Ramos, Will Navarro, Dave Ildefonso, Javi Gomez de Liano, Calvin Oftana, Kenmark Carino, and Jaydee Tungcab.
Baldwin did give praise to how the players in the Gilas pool have embraced the challenge in their training camp at Inspire Sports Academy in Calamba as they try to foster enough camaraderie to be a competitive team in Bahrain.
"I think the players in the bubble, they've dedicated themselves to one another and to the Gilas program, and they're making great sacrifices to do that," he said. "Probably the pivotal word we would use is compromise. When your time is as constricted as it is, you don't go through your normal processes of building a team. You have to whittle down the complexity of your system, you're not able to use as many different varieties of offenses and defenses, and you really have to try to cover all the basics."
"With a younger team, the introduction of elements that we believe exist more in international basketball than what we would see here in the UAAP, NCAA, or even the PBA, we have to introduce some of those concepts, so the scouting is very important."
Frankly speaking, this Gilas team is far from the kind of squad Baldwin wants the national team to be in.
"We don't think they're battle-ready," he said. "We even saw that in the NBA with their short preparation time. It took a month or so for players to look really comfortable in terms of chemistry, but even just as basketball players. While we know many of these players, if not all of them, were doing individual workouts, they weren't running up and down the court, they weren't competing, and they weren't getting enough shots up.
Even to that extent, we're trying to get as much shooting practice in on top of doing other things as possible," he said.
"It's just a fact of life that we're cutting corners in everything we can and every single coaching meeting we had, we talked more on what we can't do than what we can do. We worry about what we can't do in those timeframes, given the fact that these players come in underprepared as much as they tried to prepare themselves for eight months. That's such a long time away from competitive basketball, team environment, and daily coaching."
Still, Baldwin has enough trust on these cadets to get the job done at the best as they can once they step on the court.
After all, everything they're doing is leading up for the Gilas Pilipinas team for the 2021 Fiba Asia Cup, and later on, the 2023 Fiba World Cup.
"It's new for all of us. We're learning as we go and doing all we can, but again, we just want everybody to understand that every team is pretty much on the same boat. We have to approach this as we have no excuses and we're going out there to compete at the best that we can," he said.
"It's a step-by-step process and I think we're making progress, but we still have ways to go in our very short time to get there."
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