Tim Cone sat before the Senate Committee on Sports’ organizational meeting on Thursday and made a bold claim: Gilas Pilipinas can compete on the world stage.
However, he hammered home one important qualifier: for that to happen, the Philippines will have to send its very best basketball team, not a secondary squad—the kind hastily assembled three weeks before the 20th Asian Games and fed into the lions, so to speak.
“We can’t bring a secondary team and expect to beat the best of Korea, or the best of China, or the best of Japan, or Lebanon, or any other team. We have to bring our best to be able to compete with them…,” Cone said in the meeting, which also included the chairs of the Philippine Olympic Committee and Philippine Sports Committee, and the heads of several national sports federations.
Cone didn’t specifically expound on what he means by “secondary team,” but recent history suggests that the Asian Games squad that lost heavily to China and failed to make it to the knockout stage at Aichi-Nagoya is an example. That team was vastly different from the one Cone works with for the FIBA World Cup Asian Qualifiers, whose core is made up of Filipino players in the Japan B.League and KBL, plus a few of the PBA’s finest.
Cone Wants the ‘Very Best’ Every Time for Gilas Pilipinas
In the same meeting, Cone stressed that the original plan was to use that Gilas Pilipinas core—including Dwight Ramos, Kevin Quiambao, Carl Tamayo, AJ Edu, and Kai Sotto—in the Asian Games. Unfortunately, according to Cone, that plan didn’t materialize because the KBL refused to release Tamayo and Quiambao, while the B.League did the same for Ramos and Edu.
With Option A gone, Gilas Pilipinas pivoted to Option B, which involved sending a hastily formed team that looked far inferior to the one that beat Jordan and Iran in the fourth window of the FIBA World Cup Asian Qualifiers. That, Cone rued, isn’t a recipe for success.
“We have a unique situation because we’re one of the countries that really exports our players. We can request to those players that they try to put that [request for a release clause] in their contract, but there’s no mechanism that we have that can force those players to do it…,” Cone stressed. “If we’re going to compete at this level, at the Asian Games especially, we need to bring our very, very best. Until we can find a mechanism that forces those teams to let us grab our players, we’re gonna be in the same situation from now.”
Notably, Cone’s sentiments are also a tacit admission that the Philippines’ very best—Ramos, Quiambao, Tamayo, Edu, and Sotto to name just five—are playing overseas, not in the PBA.
Cone Still Believes in Gilas Pilipinas
Cone maintains, though, that the Philippines is good enough to compete at a world level—that is, if Gilas Pilipinas can send the very best he was alluding to.
“There’s no doubt that we can compete worldwide with our full lineup, and I really feel we can be extremely successful in Asia with our full lineup and even compete in many ways in Europe and elsewhere with the full lineup,” he pointed out. “But we don’t always get that full lineup. That’s always been the issue with the national teams in basketball, player availability, and making sure we get our best players all the time.”
To be fair, Gilas Pilipinas has had some success with that full lineup, toppling Latvia two years ago in the FIBA Olympic Qualifiers and beating New Zealand also in 2024 in the FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers. So, yes, Cone has a point. The question now is what will happen moving forward.
