GILAS Pilipinas coach Tim Cone said he will continue to stick with his compact pool even after two losses to close the FIBA Asia Cup 2025 Qualifiers last week, resisting a growing clamor from fans to bring in more players.
Cone said there are no plans to change the direction of his Gilas program built around 12 players and two alternates, which has been under scrutiny following defeats to Chinese Taipei and New Zealand in the Asia Cup qualifiers.
COLUMN: Gilas losses no more than a bad stretch; don't panic
Besides, Cone said adding players to the team isn’t as simple as it sounds.
“There’s so many things beyond what people are talking about. It’s not that easy just to pull somebody out or add to the pool or get a bigger pool,” said Cone after Ginebra’s win over NorthPort in Game One of the PBA Commissioner’s Cup semifinals.
“There’s finances involved, there’s budget, extra travel time, more practice time. It’s not as simple as just saying, 'Okay, now we’re going to go with 15 or 18 or 20 people.' It’s not that simple. We came in with a program and we’re going to stick to that program as much as we can,” added Cone.
Although he is aware of the sentiments of the some fans, Cone said Gilas won’t make any drastic changes even after the recent defeats which included setbacks to Lebanon and Egypt in a tri-nation pocket tournament in Doha.
“We’re not going be too hard-headed about it. I guess that’s the way I’m being described at this point, being hard-headed. But we’re not gonna be too hard-headed about it, but we suffered some failure at this point. Hopefully, we can learn from it, but you don’t learn from success, you learn from failure.
“I think that what we said from the very beginning, we are not going to win all the time. We’re not going to be great all the time. And that’s just an impossible thing to do. But we can be better than what we were. That’s darn sure. We can be better than what we were.
“So at this point, no, we are not going to add to the pool. We’re not going to subtract from the pool unless there’s guys out there that don’t want to join us anymore. But as long as these guys want to continue to play and represent, we’re going to let them represent.
“And people are going to get angry about it. They’re going to get angry at me about it, I guess. That’s the bottom line, but we came in with a program, we came with an idea, and we are not going to change it at first panic. We’re going to see what happens. We’ll take another chance,” said Cone.
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