Cone keeping Gilas intact

Don’t expect any new additions when Gilas Pilipinas competes in the second window of the FIBA Asia World Cup Qualifiers this February.

Gilas coach Tim Cone said he wants to have a tight and intact squad when they face powerhouse teams like New Zealand on 26 February and Australia on 1 March in the tournament that serves as the gateway to the FIBA Basketball World Cup in Doha in 2027.

After winning the gold medal in the 33rd Southeast Asian Games recently, suggestions were raised that Cone should tap professional players like Ray Parks, Matthew Wright and Robert Bolick in the Gilas pool. After all, prior to the first window against Guam, Cone drafted Juan Gomez de Liano and Quentin Millora-Brown, who boosted the Gilas squad to a pair of impressive victories.

But Cone is not interested.

“Again, we don’t want to increase it to a huge pool because that’s too unwieldy for the time of preparation that we have,” said Cone, the most successful head coach in the Philippine Basketball Association.

“When you’re talking about maybe five, six practices before you have to play, you can’t bring in 20 guys and get them ready. Like I said, there’s only 12 guys.”

Cone, who led the Philippines to the Asian Games gold medal in 2023, admitted that he considered tapping Parks and Matthew Wright to join the squad last year in the FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament (OQT) in Latvia. However, the plan was shelved due to schedule conflict.

“We’ve been looking at Ray-Ray for a long time, you know. We actually asked him to join us one time, but he couldn’t — I think it was the OQT — because he was getting engaged. He had an engagement ceremony here,” Cone said.

“We asked Matthew Wright, but he was in Canada at that time and couldn’t get his passport. And then we asked (Jordan) Heading as well.”

Gilas is bracing for a tough campaign in 2026.

Aside from the second window of the qualifiers, the Filipino cagers will also be seeing action in the Asian Games in Nagoya from 19 September to 4 October, where they will enter as the defending champions.

Cone said the smaller the pool, the shorter the learning curve for the Gilas Pilipinas squad.

“Like when Coach Chot (Reyes) prepared for the World Cup, we had like three months to prepare for that. So we had a pool of 20, 25 people because we couldn’t get everybody there every day,” said Cone, who was part of Reyes’ coaching staff during the country’s hosting of the World Cup.

“Sometimes, we had a pool of 25, only eight guys showed up. So, it was important to have a big pool there.”