HANGZHOU – Gilas Pilipinas expects China to take leaf or two from the playbook of Iran, which nearly pulled the rug from under the feet of the Filipinos in the 19th Asian Games basketball competitions.
Coach Tim Cone sees the reigning champion pouncing on the same weakness of the national team which Iran took advantage in their quarterfinal encounter which the Filipinos barely won, 84-83.
See After a long while, Cone gets another crack at China in Asiad
The Iranians applied the box-and-one on a fading Justin Brownlee in the fourth period that allowed them to claw their way back from a 21-point deficit to take an 83-82 lead with 62 seconds left to play in a thrilling endgame at the Zijingang gymnasium.
The victory wasn’t in the bag for Gilas until Brownlee countered with a floater to regain the lead, and red-hot Martin Aghajanpour missing on a late three pointer for Iran.
“When they (Iranians) threw that wrench into our plans with the box-and-one, we just kind of struggled,” said Cone.
Gilas is now bracing for the Chinese to play the way the Iranians did.
“We’re going to expect China to do it to us (on Wednesday) as well,” said Cone. “They’re gonna see our game, they’re going to figure it out.
“So we got to come up and get some counters done without a practice.”
Given the short period in between the quarterfinal and semis, Cone doesn’t see the team going to the gym and map out its plan.
“We’ll see if we could get a practice in the morning, maybe a shoot around in the morning somewhere and we could work on some things,” said the national coach.
The semis match is set at 8 p.m. at the HOC gymnasium, with the winner advancing on Friday's gold medal play against the survivor of the Jordan-Chinese Taipei game in the other semifinal pairing.
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