Wishing doesn’t make it so

Moral or symbolic victories are not real ones. That is the reality. The impressive performance of the young Gilas Pilipinas squad in the FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Belgrade also shows that they are a work in progress, albeit an admirable one. Wishing that they were more than that won’t make it otherwise. But to be fair, they are accomplishing things their older, more talented PBA predecessors did not. Maybe now everyone in the basketball community will realize what Coach Tab Baldwin has been preaching all along.

Think back. All of this really started after the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. The Americans, long the dominant force in basketball, sent a team of college kids, as was their wont. But this time, it wasn’t enough. The Americans only finished with a bronze medal. Karl Malone likened it to watching your little brother get beaten up by the school bully. It was only the second time the US had lost in men’s Olympic basketball, the first time since they were blatantly cheated by an Olympic technical official and the USSR in 1972.  How did this happen? First of all, many European pros could simply declare themselves amateur any time they wanted to play for their national teams, skirting Olympic rules against professionalism. Men were thus playing against boys from America, and we all know how that goes.

All of a sudden, NBA players wanted to play for the flag, as long as they could side-step niggling issues like conflicts in sponsorship. The 1992 US Olympic team would include only one collegian. The Philippine version actually predates the Dream Team by six months with the all-professional squad the country sent to the Asian Games in 1990. But Open Basketball was meant to be an ego massage for the Americans. And it was temporary, as we now see.

What has happened since then? The next generation of players, exhausted from playing, making personal appearances and flying all over the place, realized that they couldn’t really be forced to play in the Olympics. They exercised their choice. Many found a reason not to go. More importantly, intimidation, a big weapon of the Americans, wore off. More non-Americans played in the NBA. In fact, this season’s All-NBA First Team includes three non-Americans. Telling signs. The NBA has kept importing more and more European players, a lazy alternative to learning what makes their systems more effective than the waning American way.

As always, copycats are a generation behind. In the Philippines, where persuasion is more effective, pro players are still easily made to play for flag and country even if they don’t really feel like it. And they still play like Americans, even if it doesn’t work anymore. America, the font of many things Filipinos love, has become outdated. How could this be? If everyone has a system and are now just as big, more versatile, and more well-rounded skill-wise, athleticism will no longer take you to the top.

What Baldwin is proving is what he has been saying (mostly by his lonesome) for years: the (mostly European) system does not need pros or superstars. It needs players willing to subjugate their egos for the benefit of the team, to conform to what is needed. Players need to recover the often-lost ability to be told what to do. System over superstars. The best thing for the Philippine team now is to give him the tools to do it the right way, and stay out of his way.