Why fix it if it ain’t broke?
After Gilas Pilipinas’ newest gold medal in the 2025 Southeast Asian Games in Thailand, which obviously came the hard way, conversations for a possible expansion of the national team pool for the country to always have the best team available came about.
Tim Cone, the regular Gilas coach who yielded the position to Norman Black for the SEAG, said that it is not going to happen if the subject is the 2027 Fiba Asian Qualifiers for the World Championship.
“When you’re talking about maybe five or six practices before you have to play, you can’t bring in 20 guys and get them ready,” Cone said on Sunday, after steering his Barangay Ginebra squad to a 108-105 win over Titan Ultra at Smart Araneta Coliseum.
Cone was asked that question after the veteran tactician Black’s genius came to play—from building what can be said as a ragtag crew and making everyone perform—to coaching a brilliant campaign that had the Philippines retaining the gold that mattered at home.
But Cone stood his ground: “Like I said, there’s only 12 guys.”
Cone has been adamant about the pool he came up with, which already regained the Asian Games crown two years ago by beating the Chinese in China in the semifinals and then turning back Jordan.
But he also did not hide the fact that there were some players who saw action in Thailand who caught his fancy.
“Obviously, we’ve been looking at Ray-Ray (Parks) for a long time. We actually asked him to join us one time, but he couldn’t because I think it was the OQT and he was getting engaged,” Cone said.
“We asked Matthew Wright, but he was in Canada at that time and couldn’t get his passport,’ the two-time PBA Grand Slam winner went on. “We asked (Jordan) Heading as well. We’ve had all those guys in our radar.”
Parks and Wright were part of the Gilas program before Cone took over.
Heading has also represented the Philippines before, but didn’t suit up in the SEA Games because of duties with TNT in the Philippine Cup.
But like in any of his usual conversations regarding the Nationals, he was realistic.
He stood grounded on his idea of sticking with the core group and while it’s enticing to add even more names to the pool, he wants to stick with his future-proof plan.
“[There’s also] Jamie (Malonzo), the Ravena brothers (Thirdy and Kiefer) have always been someone we’ve talked about,” he said. “But there’s only 12 guys. And again, we don’t want to increase it to a huge pool because that’s too unwieldy for the time of preparation that we have.”
Cone’s program is for the long term. It’s not cast in stone, for sure, with some of the players aging.
The good thing is, he already saw the players who he now knows can perform on the big stage. So nothing is really cast in stone.
