What’s happening to our national basketball team?
While we just saw an unfancied national football ladies team coming home tremendously triumphant by capturing a first-ever stint in the 2023 Fifa World Cup, our national pastime that is basketball seems to be going nowhere.
Hey, raise a glass to our lady shin-busters, puleeez?
For clinching that near-impossible feat of recently reaching the semifinals of the Asian Football Cup in Pune, India, our footballers advanced to the 32-team World Cup in New Zealand and Australia.
Astonishing, to say the least.
It is a first from the distaff side to enter the apex of the sport’s quadrennial staging in the event’s ninth edition starting July 20 next year in Auckland.
Already, our gallant ladies, arriving in a hero’s welcome last weekend, have gained a stature worthy of unchallenged adulation and should, this early merit explicit yearend honors outright.
Meanwhile, turbulence has been hitting our basketball team’s own campaign in the 2023 Fiba World Cup, ranging from lineup decimation to the resignation of the team’s head coach.
But my counsel is, quit the crap.
Moping over it can only get to your nerves.
Stop being stressed, depressed.
The Gilas program has been truncated the minute the core of its so-called 23-strong training pool started signing up for teams in Japan tournaments.
Can you blame them?
Hey, they are drawing salaries in Japan much higher than the highest-paid players in the Philippine Basketball Association.
And why do you think the 7-foot-2 Kai Sotto is playing in an Australian league in Adelaide?
Do I have to hammer it into your heads again, fellas? That money rules?
I can only sympathize with coach Chot Reyes.
Studying the desolate landscape of the basketball wasteland after he got appointed a fourth time as national coach replacing the suddenly resigned Tab Baldwin, Reyes said: “I have a wish list (of players). But that’s useless now because there are almost none of them left there.”
You don’t have enough money to pay your supposed stars, you pay the price.
Baldwin left Gilas to focus more on his dream of making Ateneo a UAAP champ for the fourth straight year?
Of course. And with his decimated Gilas lineup that plunges to a battle beginning Feb. 24, what is there to coach? Clever.