Gilas Pilipinas eyes 2016 Olympics after qualifying for Fiba World Cup

Mission accomplished. Now it’s time for the Philippines to dream on again.
One day after formally claiming the second-best team in Asia tag, the Gilas Pilipinas Five will go to next year’s World Championship in Spain not as tourists, but as someone who will give it their all.
After that, they will chart the path they need to take in order to scale another lofty goal: get into the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Olympics in Brazil.
“Right now, we are seriously evaluating what the next steps would be,” Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas vice-chairman Ricky Vargas said. “We want to go to Spain with the best team we have.
“Make no mistake about it, what we have right now (for the recent 27th Fiba-Asia Championship) was the best team we’ve ever worked with,” Vargas continued. “But the World Championship is still a year away.
“A lot of things can happen in that span, including some of our players getting older.”
There are a lot of people and organizations to thank for making the world stint happen again, but the biggest believer when all this started is the basketball-enamored multi-billionaire who runs businesses ranging from telecommunications to highways to power plants.
Manny V. Pangilinan had two goals, one was the Olympics and the other the World Championship stint, which he didn’t allow to slip past his thoughts one bit since the Philippine suspension from the Fiba was lifted after three years in 2007.
“Don’t forget where we came from,” Pangilinan had told the Nationals on the eve of their classic Final Four clash with South Korea, a perennial tormentor whom the Filipinos conquered despite playing without the naturalized Marcus Douthit for the last 25 minutes.
That win put the Philippines in the roster in Spain and will slug it out with the absolute best in the globe. There won’t be any walkover matches there, but it will be an experience which the players can use for the future.
Fate set the tables up for the Filipinos to finally break the 35-year-old spell.
First, Lebanon was suspended indefinitely by the Fiba because of internal squabbles in its basketball association; Chinese-Taipei was upset by Qatar that allowed the Philippines the luxury of not clashing with China in the quarterfinals.
And there was the injury to Douthit – on who the country owes a lot of gratitude for playing like a true Filipino – which proved to be a blessing when it happened.
Playing hurt to begin with and slowing the Philippines down, Douthit’s exit gave coach Chot Reyes no other choice but to play small and beat the Koreans in an outside-shooting, run-and-gun game.
The Taiwanese, who had beaten China for the first time during the quarterfinals, tried to play their big guys on the Koreans in the bronze medal match and got clobbered big time.
Reyes also deserves a lot of the credit, he was the man in charge in assembling the team, training it, mapping out the schedules and dealing with all the pressure when many members of his pool got injured one by one.
And there’s that masterstroke when he lost Douthit; when he ordered his charges to play the zone starting the third quarter and shuffled his men like the genius that he is to great effect.
It took Pangilinan and his companies roughly around P70 million to get the Fiba-Asia hosting done, where his Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas had to take care of literally everything for its own team and the foreign delegates.
After 11 days of battles and with the Filipinos coming out a fighting second, it is safe to say that somewhere during his speech to the players after the war that he could have said something like: “We’ve realized the dream…look where we’re headed now.”