FIBA Asia: Pilipinas bows to young China

Three early fouls plus China's giants
were too much for Big Daddy 

Everything seemed to be in place: Team Pilipinas coming off a superb Jones Cup championship romp, China opting to send a bunch of wide-eyed kids who haven't grown into their man-bodies yet (most of whom will probably form the core of their 2016 FIBA Asia medal-round squad) and overall team chemistry that has made it to must-see YouTube television.

But instead of staying true to our newly-placed "dribble drive" offense, the team settled for an absurd amount of long balls that did them in 71-68. If you shoot 6/35 from deep, chances are you're just not going to put yourself in a solid enough position to win games. The team's resident gunners-- Jeffrei Chan, Gary David and Larry Fonacier were a combined 4/21 from the three-point line while Ranidel de Ocampo-- who was probably assigned to pull his defenders (a bunch of 6"10 and 7"1-3 Chinese giants) outside, going 0/5.

While the Chinese's huge line-up had a lot to do with disrupting Team Pilipinas' game plan, this game was still ours for the taking. We were down early mostly because we lost Marcus Douthit to early foul trouble on a pair of dubious calls and that reduced as to a doughnut squad both on offense and defense. The dribble drive didn't work because Douthit wasn't inside to keep helping bigs honest. And though Rico Villanueva and Sonny Thoss did a lot of the heavy lifting down low, the drop-off from Douthit-De Ocampo to Villanueva-Thoss was and is just too big.

Moving forward, Team Pilipinas should refrain from taking too many threes. Yes, that's the best way to get back in the international games and has grown to become this version of the Men's National Team's weapon of choice-- but as they always say "you live by the three, you die by the three."

There's no point in getting moral victories here, not when you just got out-rebounded, out-hustled and  out-played by a team whose oldest player is the equivalent of your youngest. China didn't run our team out of the gym, they simply beat us in the 4th quarter for eight painful minutes to reclaim their early lead and hack out a three-point win.

While you can say that this is just the FIBA Asia Cup and not the big one that allows us passage to the FIBA Worlds, there's still a lot to say about Team Pilipinas just winning on whatever stage it is on.

Douthit needs to be more assertive, specially when our shooters are going through the prerequisite mid-game slumps (unfortunately for us, it happened in the 4th). Norwood also has to go back and watch film of himself back in the Jones Cup. The Norwood we saw versus China was pretty much the same dude we've seen the last couple of years with Rain or Shine-- soft. Two times he botched gimmes by going up soft and expecting/ waiting for non-existent calls.

Jarred Dillinger did a lot of damage in the Sol Mercado role given him, and he showed a lot of promise as another option at the PG spot. Perhaps Coach Chot Reyes could experiment with a tall perimeter rotation of Dillinger, Norwood, Chan and Fonacier with Douthit manning the paint. Whatever we give up on the defensive end, we make up for with a faster pace, more combo-guards/wings who can all shoot, slash and pass.

Jones Cup MVP L.A. Tenorio finished with a solid 8 points and 4 assists and was getting to just about any spot he wanted to in the floor regardless of him being the shortest guy around-- just need his teammates to finish on his assists.

Silver lining here is that the confidence is still up because this game was definitely winnable and it's only our first game. We're grouped with Lebanon, Uzbekistan and Macau-- two of which are not on the elite level as far as Asian basketball is concerned so there's a good chance that we advance to the crossover stage.