Through the good and the bad, expect Gilas Pilipinas coach Tim Cone to stick with his core roster—until the wheels fall off, probably.
Pressed by reporters after Barangay Ginebra San Miguel rallied past the Titan Ultra Giant Risers on Sunday, Cone all but closed the door on a full-blown expansion of the current Gilas Pilipinas men’s team—even with quite a few fans clamoring for more players to be added in the wake of the team’s recent string of poor performances.
“We don’t want to increase it to a huge pool because that’s too unwieldy for the time of preparation that we have,” Cone said, echoing his longstanding belief about the matter.
“There’s only 12 guys,” he further told reporters.
Door Ajar for a Few Gilas Additions?
Cone, though, clarified that he is only against expanding the pool to 20 or more players because Gilas’ practice time is often limited, particularly in the FIBA window system Gilas is currently focusing on. That leaves the slight possibility that the PBA’s all-time winningest coach will be open to adding a player or two from time to time—just as he did in the Guam window, when he added Quentin Millora-Brown and Juan Gomez de Liaño (even though JGDL didn’t actually make the final cut).
In the remote chance Cone actually decides to add a couple of players to his pool, then he should look no farther than the standouts of the hastily assembled Gilas team that won gold in the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand recently. Incidentally, those standouts—Ray Parks Jr., Robert Bolick, and Matthew Wright, to name only three—had previously played for Gilas Men in FIBA meets.
Wright and Parks, according to Cone, were considered previously but couldn’t join for different reasons—an engagement ceremony for the latter and passport issues for the former. Incidentally, Wright has recently said he’ll play when called up again, while Parks has almost always heeded the call of duty.
But whether those two, or anyone else for that matter, will actually get an invite down the line is anyone’s guess.
