Three years ago, I wrote a piece on the need to get our national players to ‘slide down’ from their present positions in preparation for the global cage wars. The same lessons still ring true today. For it is not the lack of talent, but the lack of height and heft that will give us a great disadvantage even before the first jumpball is released. We need to change tact, otherwise all this talk about lessons learned will not amount to anything.
So what did we learn from the Gilas debacle in the recently-concluded Olympic Basketball Qualifying Tournament?
Let me go straight to the point here. After losing to the French Les Blues 93-84, and the New Zealand Tall Blacks 89-80, what was clearly evident was our team’s lack of size at the global level of competitive basketball. Our talent and cage IQ may be tops at the SEA games level of play; we may still be able to compete with the top teams at the Asian regional level; but at the global environment, the height and heft factor just cannot be denied. You may dream all you want, you may conjure basketball sorcery and magic, you may wish upon your favorite cage star, but the fact remains that in basketball, height truly is might. No amount of arguing about talent, about court savvy, about ‘puso’, or about the Splash Brothers’ incredible…
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