“WHAT the team needs is another big. That’s a problem that we have to continue looking at,” said Gilas Coach Chot Reyes after Gilas’s decent 79-63 win over India last weekend for an ego-booster shot following New Zealand’s 106-60 bamboozling of the national quintet.
Towering Ange Kouame’s injured knee remained in question, creating a huge hole in the middle as Gilas goes to battle in the Fiba Asia Cup beginning July 12.
The event will be a severe test for Gilas’s preparation for the Fiba World Cup set next year in Manila.
Gilas will face New Zealand anew in the Fiba Asia Cup in Jakarta, another battle for basketball supremacy in Asia that will also pit our boys against Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and, yes, India again in the eliminations.
“You can’t have Geo Chiu as the only center for Gilas,” said Reyes, also the Gilas project director. “Of course, Troy Rosario was supposed to be with us, but he’s injured as well.”
What also hurt Gilas’s hunt for a legitimate center was Kai Sotto’s decision to back out of an earlier commitment to join the national team.
“He has decided to do some other thing and forego the Asia Cup,” Reyes wryly said of Sotto, who was rudely bypassed in the just-ended National Basketball Association (NBA) Draft.
While it was a bit of a letdown that Sotto got undrafted and was effectively blunted in his dream to barge into the world’s premiere basketball league, it was the pundits’ position that the Filipino hopeful is not yet ripe for NBA action.
While he may have the height—7-foot-3 is not to be readily sneezed at—Sotto, at 20 years of age, is still too wet behind the ears. His present skills are way off a phenom thing. He needs to bulk up; his frame is too fragile for a league known for body-banging and boundless agility.
Sotto skipping the Asia Cup was pure perfidy of one’s desire to gain more experience, to arrest the possible onset of putrid fundamentals as a result of misadventures—such as the Adelaide excursion, which gave him scant success due to his longer time staying on the bench than on the floor.
Chot Reyes was being polite in saying that Sotto was to do “some other thing” in justifying his no-show for Gilas.
What “some other thing” Sotto would busy himself with only he knows.
It’s a shame, indeed, that Sotto, this early in his career, would shun flag and country just like that.
But Reyes is keen on tapping 6-foot-9 Poy Erram and 6-foot-7 Kelly Williams, his two extremely reliable “bigs” at TNT team that he also coaches in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA), for Asia Cup duty in Jakarta.
And isn’t 6-foot-10 June Mar Fajardo of San Miguel Beer available, too? At the rate he’s playing, the 6-foot-10, six-time PBA Most Valuable Player will prove to be a key Gilas cog.
The situation isn’t that bleak after all.
THAT’S IT Mothers are rejoicing after Germany’s Tatjana Maria defeated former French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko, 5-7, 7-5, 7-5, to reach her first Grand Slam quarterfinal at Wimbledon. Maria did it 15 years after her 2007 debut in the season’s third of four majors—and after having two children as well. “It makes me so proud to be a mum—that’s the best thing in the world,” said the 103rd-ranked Maria, 34, who fired nine aces. “I know my family is the most important for me and my two daughters (aged 9 and 1).” Viva Maria!