With just a full day before Gilas Pilipinas takes on Serbia at the Aleksandar Nikolić Hall in Belgrade, national team head coach Tab Baldwin is not optimistic that Dwight Ramos will join them.
Yes, Baldwin is close to declaring the 6-foot-5 utility player out for the 2021 FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament. The groin injury of Ramos is still not healing properly.
“I don’t see anyway that Dwight will be able to play either game.
“He is getting a little bit better the last couple of days, but groin injuries are entirely unpredictable,” he bared during Tuesday night’s episode of SMART Sports Hoops Life.
Ramos suffered the injury during Gilas-Korea II of the 2021 Asia Cup Qualifiers.
Photo from FIBA.basketball
It happened sometime in the second half of the tightly-contested tilt. But the injury was not noticeable. Ramos still played the final six minutes and 12 seconds of the game, eventually ending up with 19 points, five assists, three rebounds, and two steals.
“Dwight got his injury during the second Korea game and he finished the game, played until the end. I knew he was hurting a little bit because he was rubbing it during timeouts late in the game. And I asked him, ‘Are you okay? and he said, ‘I’m fine’,” recalled Baldwin.
“By the next day, we knew something was wrong. But because he had played through it, the thinking was this was just going to last for a couple of days, he should be coming right? So we never not considered bringing him.”
Gilas will most likely have just 11 men when they take on the world no. 5 team on July 1 and no. 19 the next day.
There are certain sectors that have voiced their displeasure that Javi Gomez de Liaño, Jaydee Tungcab, or Lebron Lopez should have been the ones who flew to Belgrade instead of Ramos.
Baldwin, though, emphasized that the team did not expect that Ramos’ injury would turn out this serious.
“I know that there are talks out there that we should have replaced him on the roster. Certainly, if we knew that he will be missing the games then we should have done that. We would have brought Lebron or Jaydee or Javi, one of those guys. But we had every expectation that he would be healthy but he has not responded to all the treatment and the rest,” he explained.
“So, unfortunately, we can’t change the roster now. There’s a date when we submitted the roster and we couldn’t change after that. It’s unfortunate for us, for Dwight, for the players that would have replaced him to gain some experience.”
