Shooting woes highlight Gilas Pilipinas defeat against Italy

The outside shooting of Gilas Pilipinas went south last Saturday as they suffer a 108-62 loss to Italy in the FIBA Basketball World Cup.

Gilas Pilipinas scored just 3 triples out of its 23 attempts for 13 percent, a huge reason for the team’s lopsided setback against Italy. In the first half, Gilas didn’t even hit a single three out of their 12 shots.

“Our problem was we had early turnovers. We fed their runs with our own turnovers. We couldn’t make our outside shots which to me was really key to beat a big team like Italy,” said Gilas Pilipinas coach Yeng Guiao during the postmatch press conference in Foshan.

Guiao said Italy is a tall team from all positions and that situation posed several problems for Gilas Pilipinas early in the game.

“Italy is really a good team. They have size at the guard position that we don’t have and they have the quickness in their bigs which we don’t have. It is really important in the international game for us to have that size and that quickness and to combine them. We knew we were coming into this game as the underdogs. We would have wanted to play it in a better way and even if we lose, we could have wanted to play better than we did,” Guiao said.

Guiao said he was hoping that Italy would be complacent against the Philippines in the first game of the tournament, but that didn’t happen.

“I’m sure that they did their homework. We also got into early foul trouble with our turnovers and we couldn’t make our three-point shots. It’s a combination of all of those. It’s not just one reason why we lost this way. All the teams int the World Cup, they do their homework. We were just hoping that they’ll be a little confident, complacent, and spend more time with Serbia or other teams. But I’m sure they did their homework against us,” said Guiao.

PHOTO: FIBA Basketball World Cup official website