It’s only been two weeks since the Philippines men’s national basketball team’s Rio dreams were crushed in their home court. Even after the sad ending to Gilas 4.0, the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas is not sulking nor resting on its laurels as the preparations for the next stage of the Gilas Basketball program for the calendar year of 2017 has already begun.
“Malungkot man tayo na hindi tayo nakaabot sa semi-finals but rest assured that the target now will be moving on towards looking at 2019 World Cup,” Gilas team manager Butch Antonio said Tuesday morning during the PSA Forum held in Malate.
“As early as now we are already making plans on continuing the Gilas program. I guess this would be the start of the Gilas 5.0 so together with SBP headed by Manny V. Pangilinan with the coaches had started meeting.”
The dynamics of world basketball drastically changed as the world governing basketball body, FIBA, altered the qualifying system for the World Championship and the Olympics. Instead of a tournament format, a home-and-away system spread across the calendar year, just like in football, will be implemented starting next year.
“We have to face some realities as far as the schedule of the new home and away program is concerned for sure there will be windows na hagip yung schedule ng PBA,” the Gilas Team Manager added.
“We’ll just work on schedule a little bit. We can always find common grounds to hook up the best team possible at every given window tournament.”
SBP executive Sonny Barrios, who was also in attendance, shared that talks between the Philippine Basketball Association and the SBP are currently ongoing, signifying that seeing professional basketball players donning the national colors is still a possibility.
“Nag-uusap ang SBP at PBA to see how we can achieve the ideal team but as we all know hindi ganun kadali under the home and away program where there will be windows of competition every year,” he said.
“The reality is hindi naman puwede mag-stop ang PBA. Lahat yan pinagaaralan ng SBP kung saan puwedeng makatulong ang PBA ng hindi naman mamamatay ang liga because of too often [SIC] disruption on their part.””
One solution the two SBP executives are looking at is to have a national team composed of Cadet members reinforced with pros, reminiscent of the first incarnation of the Gilas program.
“The whole program is still fluid it can be a hybrid of many things whether a mixture of non-PBA and PBA kasi our partnership that we have with PBA ever since has been very good,” Antonio said.
“So yun ang ina-address natin through the cadet program hopefully there will be some sort of hybrid if we can do that for some of the window tournaments in other words puwedeng may mix,” Barrios closed.
