Playing to win

Something happened to China during the 2013 Fiba Asia tournament.

The continent’s most successful basketball country was being stripped of one of its key weapons during international meets: Intimidation.

Proof of this stripping did not come during an opening day 63-59 loss to South Korea, a game where the defending champion could not make a three-point shot in 14 attempts—allowing the Korean defense to train its sights on Yi Jianlian and Wang Zhizhi. Neither did it come during a 70-51 drubbing at the hands of powerhouse Iran, when Hamed Hadadi, Oshin Sahakian, Samad Nikkhah Bahrami and Hamed Afagh took turns mocking the Chinese defense.

Proof came on Day 5 of the tournament, during a 73-67 tightrope victory over Kazakhstan, a squad that isn’t exactly royalty as far as Asian basketball is concerned. True, Kazakhstan is slowly evolving into a force on the continent. But the former Soviet republic is not on the level of the Chinese just yet. Yet the Central Asians refused to be bullied by China. Kazakhstan launched run after run and even briefly took the lead, 63-62, with 3:12 left in the game.

Kazakhstan eventually lost, but not after proving it would not back down from a team that normally wins half the battle against Asian squads by simply showing up on the court. Kazakhstan proved it would not be intimidated.

Why this mattered as Gilas Pilipinas entered Day 6 of its journey to the 2014 Fiba World Cup was simple: Even after bouncing back from a loss to Chinese Taipei with a rousing victory over Japan and even after sending Qatar to its first loss in the tournament with an 80-70 victory on Day 6, the Philippines was still on course to play China in the quarterfinals.

“Pending a miracle, I think we just arranged a date with China,” said national coach Chot Reyes after that Qatar victory at the Mall of Asia Arena.

Of course, there was one way to escape the detoured route Gilas Pilipinas was on. If the team eased off the gas pedal and “allowed” Qatar to win, it would avoid China and take on South Korea in the quarterfinals. Although the Koreans were on a roll, historically China always had been a tougher nut to crack.

But that was never an option for the proud Gilas Pilipinas team.

“We were fully aware of the situation but there was no way we were coming out [against Qatar] with anything less than our best,” said Reyes. “Not with all the people coming out to support us.”

Jimmy Alapag laughed at the fact that there was even such a suggestion, aware that such a ploy was an insult to the sport.

“The basketball gods say you have to play to win every game,” said the Gilas Pilipinas captain, a Most Valuable Player awardee in the Philippine Basketball Association. “If you tinker with that, you’ll get yourself in trouble.”

It was certainly tempting to test fate. With Gilas Pilipinas up, 57-34, late in the third quarter, Marcus Douthit contested a rebound and got kneed in his calf muscle accidentally. Douthit, the team’s best player, hopped his way to the bench and was subbed off.

Reyes admitted the first thing that crossed his mind when Douthit got hit was: “Shit, I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“I was psychologically prepared for something to happen,” he said. “But I was hoping it would come later. When it did happen, I could only hope that it was something he could play on.”

As trainers iced the affected muscle, just below his right knee, there was worry that the Philippines would never survive China with a less-than-healthy Douthit.

With Douthit resting, Qatar made a run late in the game. At that point, Gilas Pilipinas could have still let that run build momentum and taken the loss. But as Marc Pingris strongly put it: “We were not going to let that happen.” To shut down the Qatari run, however, Gilas Pilipinas needed to gamble on fielding Douthit instead of resting him for the rest of the match. Was it worth the risk? The chance that Douthit would further aggravate the injury, with the prize a quarterfinal KO match against a squad that has knocked the country out a lot of times in recent memory?

For Chot Reyes, it wasn’t even much of a choice. “I had to put [Marcus] back,” he said. For Douthit, it was the right decision. “[The injury] hurt. But the game was more important.”

But it wasn’t just for pride or the appeasement of basketball gods. For some reason, running into China during the 2013 Fiba Asia tournament wasn’t as scary as before. As Kazakhstan proved, China wasn’t making opponents shake in their pricey kicks. And intimidation always played a key role for China.

Former national coach Ron Jacobs once told a story of how, during international meets in the past when teams shared buses, any country that rode with China would automatically gravitate to the back rows, assuming that the front seats were reserved for the Chinese squad. During mealtimes, players would even queue behind the Chinese players in the cafeteria line (Jacobs said he would purposely herd the players to the front of the bus or of the line at the buffet table just to take away China’s mental edge). It was no surprise then that every time China stepped into the court, opponents would already feel that they lost.

But at the Mall of Asia Arena, that mystique, that layer of invincibility, lost a lot of its sheen. Also, China flew in on the wings of a last-minute roster change and key players were hurt and were missing games, including Yi and starting point guard Liu Xiaoyu.

“You can imagine how hard it is to lose players at the last minute,” said China’s Greek coach Panagiotis Giannakis.

Even more uncharacteristically, China was reduced to offering apologies after losses. In China’s last loss of the tournament, veteran center Wang Zhizhi told journalists through an interpreter: “Please have patience, China basketball will move forward.”

So it really did not matter anymore that Gilas Pilipinas looked headed for a quarterfinal showdown with China.

“For some reason, I wasn’t too afraid of China anymore,” said Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) president Manny V. Pangilinan. “You could see they were not as strong as they usually were. I was concerned, obviously. And we still needed to play our ‘A’ game. But I always felt we could beat China.”

Pangilinan wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

“We would’ve come out with a good game and I think we might have beaten them,” Alapag said.

Powering through: Gary David one-on-one with naturalized Qatari Jarvis Hayes.

So on Day 6, the focus wasn’t on where Gilas Pilipinas was in its bracket and how the other bracket was playing out. The focus was on winning games and letting every other thing take care of itself. Douthit played through pain and finished with 19 points and 14 rebounds. Jeff Chan continued to provide a perimeter threat, knocking down 3 of 5 attempts from beyond the arc to finish with 12 points. Japeth Aguilar provided an interesting subplot, finishing with 14 points, including spectacular dunks that made it to the tournament’s highlight reel. Gabe Norwood only had 3 points, but earned his 28 minutes on Day 6—the second most on the team after Douthit—by making naturalized Qatari Jarvis Hayes work hard for each of his 17 points.

China or no China, Gilas Pilipinas wasn’t going to let the home fans leave the arena with another bitter defeat to take to their homes.

“With the kind of crowd [support] we were getting, how do you not play to win?” Reyes said.

Who knows? Maybe there were basketball gods watching Gilas Pilipinas on Day 6 of the 27th Fiba Asia tournament. How else does one explain that less than 24 hours after refusing to mock the spirit of the game, just hours before it stepped on the court for its final assignment in the classification round, the Philippines got a really, really big break?

Part 7, up Sept. 3, 4 pm, Manila time.

Gilas holds off Qatar, 80-70