MANILA, Philippines – Gilas Pilipinas’ final week of training will be in seclusion at the Hoops Dome in Cebu where the team tries to perfect its schemes, firm up its bonding and get everyone in peak form in time for the FIBA Asia tournament proper in Changsha, China.
The Nationals will be holing themselves up in Cebu for five days, fixing everything that still needs to be fixed to be at best shape possible as they leave for the Asian joust on Monday.
The 2015 FIBA Asia Championship is slated September 23 to October 3 with Gilas Pilipinas among 16 teams fighting it out for the lone Olympic slot at stake in the tourney.
“I wanna to bring home the gold so that the people in this country will be thrilled watching their team in the Olympics next year. That’s what I wanna do. Anything else is secondary,” said Gilas coach Tab Baldwin Sunday night at the end of the last of their 14 warm-up games for the FIBA Asia.
Baldwin insisted, though, they’re still in the process of learning with the Asian meet now around the corner.
“This team is very, very knew, very young team not in terms of age and experience but in terms of time together and training opportunities. And you can’t expect to have all the cohesion in the world and expect fluid basketball when that’s the case,” Baldwin said.
“So we’re not ready yet, but we still have a week of seclusion away from you people, I hope, and away from the public and we can get better in that environment,” he added.
It’s a crucial final week where Baldwin said they’re turning their practices to “high energy to high intelligence.”
“One of the objectives now is to bring ourselves to peak readiness in terms of conditioning and that’s not mean killing them this week. It means tapering at the end of the week,” Baldwin said.
He has no doubt on the individual skills of his players but on how they will work together on a structured system.
“That’s still a learning curve for us. That’s where we at. And so I’m not comfortable and I don’t want to be comfortable,” he said.
Baldwin promised, though, that they won’t relax and won’t be complacent.
He said they have a lot of things to work on in Cebu.
“We’re refining, we’ll be introducing some new stuffs. We introduced new stuffs during the MVP Cup and we’ll refine those,” Baldwin said.
“There’s also identifying areas of weakness we saw in the Jones Cup and in the MVP Cup. And we’ll attack those areas of weakness,” he also said.
“There will also be about establishing confidence at certain lineups. If they understand that there will be specific lineup particularly for specific scenarios, then it won’t be a surprise to them. Maybe, it will be surprise to the opposition,” he added. “They will know what their roles are. They will know whether they’ll be out there for a rebound, for energy, defense, pressure, shooting or whatever.”
Gary David and Troy Rosario will still be working out with the Final 12 in Cebu.
“We’re not planning to make change, but we’re prepared to make change when necessary,” said Baldwin.
Baldwin and the Gilas quintet carry on their shoulders the hopes of the nation for the country to be back in the Olympics for the first time since the 1972 Munich Games.