Gilas Pilipinas lost its second game at the 2024 Olympic Qualifying Tournament against Georgia, 94-96, but still secured the chance to book one of the last four tickets to the Paris Games as it entered the semifinals in the basketball competitions in the Latvia’s capital city of Riga on superior quotient.
Gilas’ 9-point win over Latvia earlier Thursday in Manila and Latvia’s 28-point winning margin against Georgia on opening day, gave the Philippine team coached by Tim Cone a plus 18 advantage even before the game started. Simply, Georgia had to win against Gilas by 19 points to advance to the semifinals match.
With the superior quotient even after the loss to Gilas, Latvia takes top spot in the bracket and will meet whoever between Brazil and Montenegro lands on second spot in the other bracket in the Riga OQT. Gilas will face off with the number one team.
The winner of the Riga OQT will get one of the last four tickets of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, where basketball competitions start on 27 July. The three other Olympic qualifiers are being played in Greece, Puerto Rico and Spain.
For most of the first half, world number 23 Georgia, with two NBA players on its roster, appeared in good form to secure the other semi finals berth, scoring the first 16 points of the tussle against an obviously tired Gilas starting squad that 16 hours earlier completed a shocking upset against host country Latvia.
A two-shot midway through the first quarter by naturalized player Justin Brownlee seemed like rain after a long dry spell, allowing Gilas to shake off its stupor and narrow the deficit to 8 points. A lay-up by Tornike Zhengelia, a former player of NBA team New Jersey Nets, with under one minute left in the quarter gave Georgia a 28-17 lead at the end of the first 10 minutes of play.
George built a massive 20-point lead in the second quarter, but an injury to Kai Sotto after an unsportsmanlike by guard Joe Thomasson and a decision by the Gilas coaching staff to shift to a zone defense from man-on-man allowed the Philippines to limit penetrations and narrow the deficit down to 6 points behind a slew of 3-point shots from several players and contributions by center Junmar Fajardo inside the painted area.
(Sotto missed out the rest of the game and was later taken to the hospital to check his injury.)
Two 3-point shots in a row at the end of the second quarter gave Georgia a 55-44 margin heading into the half-time break, giving them 20 more minutes to secure a 19-point win that would send them into the semifinals in Riga.
Gilas stuck with the zone defense in the 3rd quarter, slowing down Georgia’s offense and allowing the Filipino hoopsters to find their marks to level the count, 74-74, at the end of the third quarter.
Dwight Ramos, Karl Tamayo, and Brownlee had their respective shares of 3-point shots, taking the air out of the Georgian team, whose players were probably struggling psychologically on how to score in bunches to advance to the semifinals.
Georgia tried to mount a rally and scored several points in a row. What they failed to do is adjust on their defense to get more possessions and opportunities to score.
CJ Perez took the scoring reins in the fourth quarter to help Gilas keep in step with Georgia—even snatching the lead briefly. Gilas had the chance to equalize in the last few seconds but Cone and his assistant coaches decided not to risk giving Georgia five extra minutes in overtime to pull off a miracle.
“This is the first time I felt good about losing,” said Cone. Cone, the winningest coach in the Philippines, confessed committing a coaching lapse that could have been costly—he failed to tell Chris Newsome to not shoot the second free throw and instead take a five-second violation. Instead, Newsome missed the shot, giving Georgia’s Giga Bitadze a chance to dunk the ball into the Gilas basket to send the game to overtime but missed. “I blanked out. I didn’t think about it. We were lucky we didn’t go into overtime,” he said.
With its entry into the semifinals in Riga, Gilas will need to win two more games to secure a ticket to the Olympics, a feat never accomplished by a Philippine basketball squad since the 1972 Munich Games.
