How to beat South Korea
NO, China isn’t the defending basketball champion in the Asian Games as had been written here. South Korea it is. Sorry.
We will play South Korea on Monday, a quarterfinal outing that will again test our resilience.
While we almost upset China before dropping an 82-80 decision on Wednesday in the preliminaries to finish with a 1-1 card going to the next round, it could be a totally different battle for us against the Koreans.
China has no naturalized players like the Philippines. It doesn’t need one anyways as China has an abundance, if not an excess, of tall players.
But not Korea, which finally copied us and had also Ricardo Ratliffe as a naturalized Korean.
Ratliffe, formerly an import in the Philippine Basketball Association, is a 6-foot-8 dead shot who averages 23 points and 13 rebounds a game.
He scored 21 points in powering Korea to a 11777 rout of Thailand en route to Korea’s unblemished 3-0 sweep of their division qualifiers.
But Philippine coach Yeng Guiao, handling the core of the PBA’s Rain or Shine squad, is not worried of Ratliffe.
“Ratliffe is not the only one delivering the goods for Korea,” Guiao told the Business Mirror’s sports editor, Jun Lomibao. “Korea is getting balanced contributions. The best thing about Korea is they’ve been so patient running their plays. They rely on their ball movement and would wait for an opportunity to break down the defense and then attack it.”
The Koreans are perennial triple artists. In their three wins, they shot 40-plus percent from beyond the arc, hitting 47 percent (15-of-32) against Thailand.
Thus, the zone defense will not help us any against Korea.
Saying size and height aren’t much of a problem with Korea, Guiao said a solid defense would be the key to beating the defending champions.
I agree. We’ve done that in 2013, when we beat Korea in the Manila Fiba Asia Cup using a choking, bee-swarming, defense that forced their shooters into a virtual zero diet of threes.
Now, because defense is the best offense, our shooters and attackers must also sustain a teamwork anchored on patience and fluid transitions.
Otherwise, we might go home empty-handed.