Cone: Balance-wise, we put best team together
TIM Cone knows the risk that goes with just naming 12 players in the latest Gilas Pilipinas iteration.
Age, injuries during the process of preparation and even tournament games, among others, could play a big factor as Gilas dives into international competitions beginning this February 22 in the FIBA Asian Qualifiers 2025.
But the American coach believes the advantages outweigh the disadvantages as he accepts the challenge of piloting Gilas through troubled waters.
“This time we go with the 12, and obviously, there’s gonna be injuries, age factor, chemistry factor, preparations and attitude factors, whatever. But the idea of getting the 12, and with minimum disruption, they know who they are. There are no tryouts anymore [so we see] where it goes from there,” Cone said.
The 66-year-old Cone admitted that his experience handling the national squad known as the Centennial Team back in 1998 gave him tons of lessons in forming the Gilas squad today.
The 1998 batch was a superstarladen national team that had the likes of Vergel Meneses, Jojo Lastimosa, Alvin Patrimonio, Allan Caidic, along with bigs like Marlou Aquino, Dennis Espino and Andy Seigle.
Yet, even that talent-stacked Philippine team couldn’t bring home the bacon after finishing with just a bronze medal in the 1998 Asian Games in Busan, South Korea.
Cone, in retrospect, admitted that their overseas trips to prepare for the Asiad back in 1998 left the PBA bereft of its stars during the season, a delicate balance he had to tread considering that team owners still pay for their salaries.
“Balance-wise, we put the best team together. We had the full support from the PBA to get the players we wanted. We then had more of a tryout phase that was something new to us,” said Cone in his recent guesting at “Power and Play.”
“So we got the pool of players, we got like 24 or 28 players in the beginning and whittled them down, and it was a very long process, so doing that and going from there and learning from that,” he added.
“The more players you have, the more you have to teach, and the more you have to figure out who best fits. But that takes time and again, your stakeholders or guys paying those players to be part of what we’re doing on a daily basis, they are wondering what are you gonna do with our league, our team, so the difficulty arises.”
He adds: “Again, the problem with that is the PBA played without the stars, a difficult conference for them, and just something they can’t do conference to conference to conference, to miss their stars and not getting to play, getting injured while playing for national team.”
Still, despite the debacle of 1998, Cone believes he’s learning from it as he tries to navigate this new Gilas team that could hopefully make it all the way to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
Other than the lessons he’s getting from the Centennial team 26 years ago, Cone said they’ve also looked at a solid blueprint left by the Iran men’s basketball program, which has worked wonders for over a decade after producing the likes of Hamed Haddadi, Nikkhah Bahrami, among others, along the way.
“They (Iranians) kept the team together despite their league. They kept the team together, and they dominated the Asian circuit for 8 to 10 years with Haddadi in their group,” explained Cone.
“That’s the idea here. We have less preparation time, but less disruption, so we use the one window to prepare us for the second window. It’s just like playing the first conference to get us better to the second, and the second to the third. So it’s kind of that idea but instead, we do it in 4 years,” he added.