Amid dominant Gilas wins, Chot stresses importance of 'hustle stats'

MANILA, Philippines — Chot Reyes is happy that Gilas got the win. But at the same time, he is not celebrating. Yet.

After beating Singapore for their second SEABA win, Reyes emphasized the difference between Friday and Saturday night’s intangibles.

“We wanted to beat our hustle numbers from last night,” he said. “We had a very poor second half, hustle-wise, effort-wise. I don’t know if it was even enough to beat last night’s numbers.”

“It wasn’t a good second half,” he added tersely.

?READ: Gilas breezes through Singapore for 2nd SEABA win

In the lopsided outing against Myanmar, which Gilas beat by more than 100 points, Reyes explained that he was trying to put a premium on the “hustle stats.”

On Saturday he explained what exactly those are.

“The hustle stats are stats you don't see on your stat sheets,” he said. “Deflections—I think we had 10 in the first half. I don’t know how many we had in the second half.”

“Screen assists, screens that lead to baskets—to shots; the passes that lead to assists, diving on the floor for loose balls—what we call our ‘floor burns,’” he added. “Padamihan nga ng gasgas sa tuhod. We track all of those things. I’ve been doing that to all of my teams.”

Reyes went on to say that he has been employing the strict monitoring approach even since his Coca-cola days.

“I’ve been doing that since 15 years ago. Those are the things we track that are not in the regular stat sheet,” he said.

Butt if there’s any correlation the statistics sheet would help show, that is that the Philippines had less second-chance points in their second assignment. They tallied 15 against Singapore compared to 23 versus Myanmar.

Total team steals saw a dip as well. Against the Burmese, the Filipinos collected 25; against the Singaporeans, only seven.

“We take what the defense gives us, we play at our own pace. But it wasn't like last night because Singapore is a much better team than Myanmar. That's just to be expected,” Reyes noted.

“We're trying a lot of different combinations, we even tried a no-point guard line-up. Games like this afford us the opportunity. But like I said, even if we have different combinations, we still should be playing at a high level,” the returning national tactician said.

“I understand from the players' point of view. It's hard to get themselves ready and up all the time for these games, but we have to remain disciplined and prepare for the tougher games,” he explained.

Gilas takes on Malaysia next—one of the three teams assistant coach Jong Uichico said the nationals were watching out for.