KUALA LUMPUR—Gilas Pilipinas barely left MABA Stadium the same way it came in.
Southeast Asia’s most dominant basketball program had to fight tooth-and-nail against Thailand to capture an 81-74 win at the start of the 2017 Southeast Asian Games basketball tournament.
“We expected that Thailand would put up a fight, but we didn’t expect that we would play that bad,” said guard Kiefer Ravena Monday at Sunway Putra Hotel here. “It was an ugly one for us but we ended up winning and that was the end goal.”
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Thailand managed to take a 71-69 lead midway through the fourth and it needed the late-game heroics of Ravena and Baser Amer to lead the Philippines to the victory.
Gilas went on an 8-0 run to take a 77-71 lead with the backcourt tandem scoring six points in the pivotal spurt.
Ravena said that if ever they plan to win the Philippines’ record 17th gold medal in the regional games, they have to be sharp from the get-go down to avoid playing catchup.
“I guess we have to avoid things like these from happening again,” said Ravena, who finished with 11 points but shot 4-of-14 from the field.