Gilas Pilipinas head coach Tim Cone is sticking with the same lean list of names in his pool despite the growing clamor of adding more pieces ahead of the 2025 FIBA Asia Cup in August.
Despite the squad’s disastrous road trip during the tournament’s final qualifying window last week, Cone is adamant that no changes will be made unless necessary.
“At this point, no, we’re not gonna add to the pool. We’re not gonna subtract from the pool unless there’s guys out there that don’t want to join us anymore,” Cone said.
“But as long as these guys want to continue to play and represent, we’re gonna let them represent.”
Gilas sorely missed the services of injured center Kai Sotto in the Filipino’s twin away losses, suffering a stunning 84-91 defeat at the hands of a revamped Chinese Taipei before absorbing a 70-87 drubbing against New Zealand.
The back-to-back defeats denied Gilas the top seeding in Group B, which would’ve given the squad a favorable draw in the main tourney slated for 5 to 17 August in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Overall, the Nationals lost four straight out of the five games they played in the grueling road campaign including a short four-nation goodwill tilt in Doha.
Cone knows that not expanding the pool would not bid well with growing discontent from fans, especially after what happened in the third window, but the decorated tactician is standing by his program.
“People are gonna get angry about it. They’re gonna 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. We’re not going to change it at that first time,” he said.
“Let’s see what happens.”
Cone, who steered Gilas to a gold medal finish in the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games, explains that having a bigger pool is easier said than done.
“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,” shared Cone, who also handles Barangay Ginebra in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA).
“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.”
Cone believes Gilas will learn from its experience and be better moving forward.
“We’re not going to 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,” the American mentor said.
“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.”