MANILA – Gilas Pilipinas national men’s basketball team head coach Tim Cone conveyed his disappointment regarding the team’s subpar performance in the recent 2nd Doha International Cup.
Cone noted that the national team fell short of their objectives in Doha, Qatar, which they used to prepare for their campaign in the February window of the 2025 FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers beginning tonight.
“Bottom line is, we were not happy with our play. We maybe bit off more than we could chew with this Doha trip,” Cone said in a statement. “We didn’t respond well to the adversity of the long trip and the three games in a row.”
“We were sluggish throughout and our usual ball movement was lacking,” he added. “Now we move on to the real games, the ones that count. We’ll see if this experience helped us for our window.”
Gilas Pilipinas commenced their campaign in Doha with a narrow 74-71 win against the host team, Qatar, but subsequently faced two significant defeats against Lebanon (75-54) on Saturday and Egypt (86-55) on Sunday.
Nevertheless, Cone emphasized that valuable lessons were learned from competing against formidable Middle Eastern teams during their time in Doha, which they can apply in their matches against Chinese-Taipei tonight and New Zealand on February 23.
“But we did play the Middle Eastern teams and seeing the problems they present,” Cone said. “They were physical and we’ll need to adjust to that physicality in the future. We wanted this trip to be hard and perhaps it was a little harder than we anticipated.”/PN
