CHICAGO - Now that Tim Cone is poised to take over as head coach, the spotlight shifts to the vacancy in another sensitive position at Gilas Pilipinas.
The program director.
If you're sitting down right now, hands white-knuckled in suspense while gripping the arm rest, please don't hold your breath.
READ: Tim Cone is SBP choice to be permanent Gilas coach
On the heels of Cone's grand arrival, multiple sources told me that the Samahang Basketbol Ng Pilipinas (SBP) is still scrambling to fill the void.
And with the federation's options emptying, there's a good chance Cone could end up being named program director as well.
I HOPE NOT.
Letting Cone wear two hats the way Chot Reyes was allowed to be the program director and coach at the same time will be a mistake. Just look at how horribly it ended for Chot last September.
"It's brutal," Reyes said of his exit that was induced by so much vitriol aimed at him and his family on social media.
"It was just too heavy, too painful, too tough. There were also really hurtful words," the returning TNT coach added, anguish piercing his soul.
Cone wields a lot of gravitas as Ginebra coach, but not all Gilas fans are Ginebra fans. And when the shit hits the fan, like it did at the World Cup where we fell flat on our faces at 1-4 at home, that Never Say Die vest might not be enough to shield Cone from the backlash.
So let's do Tim Cone a favor.
Give him the freedom to focus all his time and energy as a coach where he does his best work. Don't make him the program director. He is not an administrator.
Look, Gilas prospered when Tab Baldwin was both coach and program director. But Tab is an outlier. And there are no outliers among the usual personnel that the SBP rotates like the luggage in an airport carousel.
Absent the conveniently forgotten Baldwin, it's imperative for SBP to split the coaching and programming duties like an atom. Insisting otherwise would be tantamount to foolishly goading a history of failure to repeat itself.
THIS IS WHY TWO PEOPLE ARE NEEDED FOR THE COACH AND PROGRAM DIRECTOR SPOTS.
The coach is the field general, in charge of plotting strategies and getting the troops ready for battle. The program director, meanwhile, mans the store front and takes charge of logistics and playing personnel, their schedules and availability, etc.
Just look back at what happened in the months leading to the Fiba World Cup 2023. Reyes had to cram practices while at the same time worrying about who is going to populate the roster.
The multi-tasking, thrown on top of the pressure to perform on home soil, arguably helped wear down what was otherwise a mentally tough, battle-tested Reyes.
Just as it does in the NBA and PBA, a general manager is usually in place before a coach is named. Unless Cone is going to take a 2-for-1 deal, Gilas puts the wrong shoe first by picking Cone while the program director job is still open.
If this sounds familiar, it's likely headed to a sad, familiar ending.
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