Gilas still a work in progress, says Baldwin

MANILA, Philippines – Coach Tab Baldwin insisted Gilas Pilipinas is a work in progress and that their poor showing in Estonia can’t be used as a gauge on how they will actually perform in the coming FIBA Asia Championship.

“Right now we’re still in the process of building a basketball team so I can’t even assess how good we will become yet,” said Baldwin.

Forget losses to the Netherlands, Estonia and Iceland. He maintained there’s a lot of positive things gained in the trip, foremost was the bonding.

 “The most important thing about the trip is we finally got away. We finally got together as a group of people and it was obvious that there was a good feeling and there was some bonding that went on with the team,” Baldwin said.

“And that’s really important. I don’t believe you can be a real strong team without that,” he added.

Back in their Manila camp where they’re joined in by Marc Pingris on Wednesday, the Gilas pool are now addressing weaknesses identified in their Estonian journey.

“I’m a little more concerned about our defense than our offense. The offense definitely showed signs of improvement but we were a step slow defensively the whole tournament so it’s something we’ve gotta work on,” Baldwin pointed out.

“It’s something that we were struggling to cover. There are a lot of factors there. Some of it is our systems have to be adjusted. Some of it is our fitness,” he added.

But Baldwin is convinced they’ve gotten better.

“We didn’t come away with any results but I didn’t really have a lot of expectations and I probably didn’t have as good an estimation of what the competition would be,” he said.

“We would like to have gotten a win over there but we came away a better basketball team,” he also said.

“We always understand that that’s gonna take a bit of time. It was never gonna be a miracle that they would just, after such short practice time and with these many disruptions as injuries as we’ve had, that it would be smooth. And it wasn’t smooth, but we got better and better.”

Resuming their training with two sessions Wednesday, the national pool goes through the same course Thursday then leaves for Taipei for the Jones Cup on Friday.

LA Laker Jordan Clarkson was to join Gilas in their evening workout Wednesday night.