The Tim Cone-led Gilas Pilipinas men’s team entered 2025 with one of its pillars—Kai Sotto—sidelined with an ACL tear. So, right off the bat, it was more or less expected that the team would encounter rough sailing. But no one could have predicted the depths to which Cone and his squad would drown in 2025 as they failed to recapture the magic of their winning ways in previous years.
Doha Disaster: An Omen of Things to Come
Gilas actually started the year on a winning note, rallying past a vastly improved Qatar side to open the nationals’ campaign at the Doha International Cup, a four-team pocket tourney meant to prepare Gilas for the FIBA Asia Cup in August.
A day later, Gilas suffered its first loss of 2025 courtesy of Lebanon, which outclassed the Filipinos, 75–54. Another loss followed, this time at the hands of Egypt, which gave Gilas an even bigger butt-whopping in the form of an 86–55 dismantling. The games in Doha did not count for much, actually, but they exposed Gilas in ways no one ever imagined when the team notched historic wins over Latvia and New Zealand the year prior.
Cone was unfazed. He preached continuity. He banked on familiarity. He stuck to his guns, even if they seemed to be firing blanks. Yet another loss followed—a 91–84 loss to Chinese Taipei on hostile ground. This one stung. The Philippines, for the longest time, had been beating Chinese Taipei, often handily, and now the tables turned. Again, Cone remained defiant. He refused to heed clamors for change. He stayed the course, even if it had turned all sorts of bumpy.
Two Wins to Stop the Bleeding and the Saudi Unraveling
Two victories in friendlies—a come-from-behind 103–98 win over the Macau Black Bears and a 75–61 triumph over Jordan—just days before the FIBA Asia Cup fanned hopes that Gilas could be turning a corner. It turned out that was all false hope. Chinese Taipei proved its February win over Gilas was not a fluke, notching a wire-to-wire victory to give the national team a rude welcome in Saudi Arabia. New Zealand then reasserted its mastery of the Philippines with a 94–86 win that did not look as close as the final score indicated.
Uncharacteristically close wins over Iraq and Saudi Arabia, two teams the Philippines dominated so thoroughly in years past, gave Gilas the faintest of hopes of salvaging a more respectable finish at the FIBA Asia Cup. Australia dashed those hopes with a commanding performance that saw the Aussies blanket Justin Brownlee and toy with the rest of the national team.
The final standings of the FIBA Asia Cup showed Gilas finished seventh out of 16 nations. In a vacuum, finishing in the top half of any tournament is not all that bad. But in the grand scheme of things, this Gilas squad underachieved in Saudi Arabia, with its podium ambitions dashed right at the very start of the tournament by a loss to a team the Philippines could have—and should have—beaten.
Notably, that underwhelming FIBA Asia Cup campaign showed the same major flaws that hampered Gilas in its four-game losing streak in February: an overreliance on Justin Brownlee, the inability to consistently hit the three-ball, porous defense, and Cone’s infamously short rotation.
The Guam Consolation
Believe it or not, a terrible year could have ended much worse for Gilas. The first window of the FIBA World Cup Asian Qualifiers was scheduled for November, which meant Cone and his wards had about three months to put all that prior losing in their rearview mirror and reset for the battles ahead. It certainly helped that Guam was next for Gilas, as it meant the Philippines was up against a lesser adversary.
Gilas predictably took care of business, beating Guam convincingly both on the road and at home to get a head start in the FIBA World Cup Asian Qualifiers.
A win is a win as the saying so infamously goes. But those victories, to a man, served less as a turning point and more as a temporary reprieve. Those wins did what they were supposed to do—restore a measure of confidence, steady the ship, and remind everyone that Gilas is still capable of beating the teams it is expected to beat, in this case the 79th ranked nation, according to FIBA.
However, Gilas’ wins over Guam did little to erase the larger questions that defined 2025: whether continuity has become stubbornness, whether loyalty to a core has come at the expense of evolution, and whether the margins that once separated Gilas from the rest of Asia have quietly closed.
A Down Year or the Beginning of the End for Cone’s Gilas?
For now, the victories over Guam allow Cone and his players to breathe, reset, and live to fight another day. Yet if 2025 proved anything, it is that past triumphs no longer guarantee future success. The losses were not random, and the flaws were not fleeting. They were recurring, glaring, and costly.
Gilas moves forward with a record that looks respectable on paper, but a year that felt anything but. Whether this season becomes a painful anomaly or the beginning of a deeper reckoning will depend on what comes next. Because in international basketball, standing still is the fastest way to fall behind—and 2025 showed, in no uncertain terms, that Gilas can no longer afford to do just that.
