Gilas Pilipinas will face tall odds when they go up against the Tall Blacks of New Zealand on Nov. 21, but Tim Cone is keeping the faith.
The head-to-head basketball match-ups between the Philippines and New Zealand have pretty much been one-way traffic.
Gilas Pilipinas has not had much success recently against the Tall Blacks in FIBA men’s basketball. The two sides met three times in 2022, and none of those matches was particularly competitive: 92-75, 106-60, and 88-63 all in favor of New Zealand.
Both teams will meet once more on Nov. 21 at the Mall of Asia Arena in a FIBA Asia Cup 2025 qualifying game, and this time, Gilas coach Tim Cone is hoping for a favorable result for his team even as their opponents are coming in with new personnel.
The Tall Blacks have a new head coach in Judd Flavell, who has taken over from Pero Cameron. Their listed lineup is also different from the one they fielded in last year’s FIBA World Cup, with only four holdovers from their World Cup squad.
“Their system’s going to change a little bit,” Cone said. “They’re bringing over a little different personnel than they have from the past years and they’re a little different from the World Cup that the team that came over here in 2023 so they might be a little bit more difficult to prepare for.”
The most crucial addition, though, is Australian NBL veteran Corey Webster.
“He’s going to be a guy that we’re going to have to be attentive to,” Cone said of Webster. “He can change a game. He gets hot, he gets rolling. He can really change the game.
The Tall Blacks have also apparently gotten even taller.
“They bring in a lot more size than they have in the past,” Cone noted. “They’ve got a couple of guys that are 6’11”, 7 feet. They haven’t had those in the past. They’ve been on their youth team, the younger players.”
Another name on the roster that is familiar to Filipino fans is former Converge FiberXers import Tom Vodanovich, who has spent the last year also playing in the NBL.
“This team looks a lot more, if I may say, they’re a little bit younger, but more athletic. Again, the coach is brand new. He’s brought three or four of his players along, so they’re going to have continuity. I just think that this is their first game together as a group.
“I remember our first game when we played in Hong Kong and when we first got together. There was a lot of excitement, a lot of energy, and we were raring to play. We expect that from them as well. They’ll know us a little bit better because they’ve seen us in the OQT.
“They’ve seen us in some of our windows already. In that regard, they’re going to have a little bit of an advantage. We have had that continuity over this last year, and that might bode us well as well.”
Cone was referring to their strategy of keeping a compact pool of players together, which is advantageous in situations like these with limited preparation time.
“That’s why we’ve kept it together. That’s why we’ve kept the pool small and not expanded the pool because we don’t have the extended time to teach all the time. The days of four to six weeks or eight weeks of preparation time for a tournament, those days are over because that’s not the way FIBA is done now. It’s all done in these small windows. You have small prep because there are small windows.
“You have small prep time. This is the way that we perceive the program working in terms of how the FIBA does things these days. Even when we go into FIBA Asia (Cup) in August next year in Jeddah, we’re still only going to have seven or eight days of prep for that tournament as well.”
Cone, though, acknowledges the challenge facing Gilas on Nov. 21.
“You know they’re the 22nd ranked team in the world, and that’s higher than the Georgia team that we played,” he said, referring to the Georgia team that beat Gilas 96-94 in the FIBA OQT last July. “Georgia was 24th in the OQT. They are a tough, tough team. They’re a physical team. They’re a nation of rugby players so they know how to play physically. It’s a part of their culture. It’s not personal, it’s just the way they play and so that’s something we’re going to have to be conscious of.”
Still, Cone has faith in his team, which is easily one the tallest national teams ever assembled, and the home crowd.
“I don’t think they’ve seen a team like the team we’re assembling, so I think we got a shot at beating them. And we want to certainly protect our home court.”
Banner Images from PBA Media Bureau.