IMAGINE San Miguel Beer without reigning eight-time MVP June Mar Fajardo. Or Ginebra without former MVP winner Scottie Thompson for a season.
Gilas Pilipinas coach Tim Cone admitted there are really big shoes—literally and figuratively – to fill in with the absence of 7-foot-3 center Kai Sotto due to an ACL injury in the Nationals’ bid in the FIBA Asia Cup in August in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
“We know we’re going to be without Kai for the rest of the year. We’re going to have to weather that storm without him,” Cone said. “Like I said, it’s like in the PBA. You lose your No. 1 player, your star.
“You have to play three conferences without him. It’s really, really hard. It’s hard to stay and maintain your level of play,” he added.
Sotto’s exclusion told heavily on the Filipino dribblers as they posted a 1-2 record in the Doha International Friendly Basketball Championship.
Gilas eked out a come-from-behind 74-71 victory over Qatar in their opening match before falling to Lebanon (54-75) and Egypt (55-86).
Then, the Philippine five suffered two straight losses in the third and final window of the Asia Cup qualifiers to Chinese Taipei 84-91 and to New Zealand 70-87 two weeks ago.
Sotto was good for 15.5 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 3.8 assists in Gilas’ four wins in the qualifiers before the injury he suffered last January while seeing action for the Koshigaya Alphas in the Japan B.League.
Gilas ended with a 4-2 record, good enough to advance to the Asia Cup.
While he welcomed 6-foot-10 AJ Edu’s first stint under him, Cone said the adjustments also took their toll on the team defensively.
“We’ll have to do that in the meantime, and hopefully, we can get better. The idea actually was with AJ’s addition, we would become a better defensive team,” Cone said. “Again, we spent so much time trying to integrate him into the triangle that we didn’t really integrate him into our defense and the hindsight is best sight.
“If I could do it again, I’d make sure that we get locked in defensively before we got locked into the triangle so that’s on me.”
