THE three-point shot that Andray Blatche launched from the corner with time winding down never made it to the hoop nor touched the net in a meaningful way.
It was stopped in mid-passage by a Palestinian defender—and horrified fans that sat glued to the satellite television coverage, could not believe their ears when Andy Jao—the intelligent voice of a game analyst—blurted out, “We’re going to lose this one.”
It was not a formidable-looking shot, like the one that the Palestinian triggerman, Jamal Abu Shamala, had taken in the last one minute or so from the top of the keyhole, a dagger of a shot fired over the flailing arms of the helplessly beaten Gilas defender that went straight through the hoop, all net. It was a shot that was like a cannon ball—it shattered the Gilas Pilipinas’s morale, turned its steely courage into marshmallows and it made this Philippine campaign suddenly looking dangerously ill, and in need of a CPR.
That aborted shot by Blatche epitomized all that could be said about the Gilas boys’ first game, in the Philippines’s worst start in this tournament, called the Asian Basketball Confederation in former times. The team ran out of steam; it ran out of ammo; and in the face of a deadly four-man scoring core of a crew from Palestine—an admirable people still in diaspora and “who are very young in basketball,” their American coach Jerry Steele said—it was short of the iron will that was absolutely needed to pull this one out of the fire.
In the last fifteen seconds of the game, when victory still looked possible, the Filipinos were acting like they—not their opponents—were the babes in the woods, fearful and tentative.
If they had designed a play just for this specific moment, as logically there should be, I didn’t see the semblance of a pattern. Perhaps, there was, but it was met by the Palestinian armor—hammered and fitted in just two weeks of training, about one-eighth that of Tab Baldwin’s boys.
Jayson Castro, still our best point guard, twice dashed into the keyhole, only to kick out the ball each time. Would a drive against a foulsaddle Palentinian zone have been a realistic option? It was, after all, in penalty, and the Filipinos needed a two-pointer to tie, so it could possibly win the game in extra time.
Instead, it was the kick-out pass that was favored—a killer if it went in. It was the nerves of the Palestinians, who play basketball as a “hobby,” that held like strands of steel. And no play was better than the deflection on Blatche’s final shot by Sani Sakakini, who also nailed the go-ahead three-point play under 16 ticks left.
When Blatche had the wind in his lungs and iron in his legs, he was magnificent as promised after the team’s training in seclusion in Cebu. Shooting from beyond the arc and flipping in his shots, almost at the level of the rim, he was the best player in the first half, when the Filipinos ran away, 27-12
But his shooting arm, and then his legs, were gone by the time the game hit the critical home stretch. He could jump high but only once, twice, and the Palestinian big men, especially Samal Sakakini, would out-jump him.
Most revealing about this loss, which saw how the Filipinos got clobbered off the boards, was the opposing team’s relentlessness in shooting. Baldwin pointed out that the Palestinians had eighty-three shots. “In a 40-minute game, that’s unheard of,” he said. “That’s two a minute.” Only three Palestinians accounted for their side’s 65 points
The Filipinos’ point production dwindled progressively as the game wore on. In the second quarter they scored 18, in the third 14 and in the fourth 14.
All is not lost though in this high-stakes basketball campaign to punch a ticket to Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Games next year.
From marshmallows in the first game, the Gilas boys were tigers in the second. And all talk of ambitious Hong Kong registering an upset win, following its 87-50 demolition of Kuwait, were dashed early. The Filipinos scored the first 12 points of the game, and the rout was on, mercilessly ending it at 101-50, registering the widest margin in the International Basketball Federation Asia tournament in Changsa so far.
The post-game comment by the veteran Marc Pingris, foul-saddled and a nonfactor in the first game, may have explained best this rollicking win. “We just didn’t have the heart the last time,” he said. “But as we are wounded, we showed that big heart of ours today.
It was the Filipinos’ effort that made the difference, because they kept it up for forty minutes. Baldwin could talk again with a little swagger to show. “I don’t think we did enough [on Wednesday]. We don’t redeem ourselves until we wipe every bit of doubt on everybody’s mind on who we are as a national team,” Baldwin said.
What the efforts showed was reflected in shooting and rebounding. Blatche observed that Gilas Pilipinas did “only two things different from Wednesday,” hit shots and had rebounds. The Filipinos ripped the Crown Colony boys, made up mostly of collegiate players, by hitting 40 points from three-point range (14 of 34 or 41 percent) and taking a 62-38 edge off the boards.
Baldwin made on observation that’s going to be scrutinized in every Gilas game. They easily beat Hong Kong’s man-to-man and zone.
“I think teams will have trouble manning us,” he said. “But today we proved that we can be dangerous against the zone, as well.”
We’d like to see that in the next round.