MANILA – Following their 90-80 loss against Lithuania, Gilas Pilipinas head coach Chot Reyes shed some light on the team’s performance against the eight-man team that they faced on Tuesday.

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“First of all we tried a different starting lineup this time, a different combination,” said Reyes in an interview with Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas’ Carlo Pamintuan.

“We tried to start Justin [Brownlee] at the three-spot, we wanted to start Japeth [Aguilar] at the four-spot since he’s been playing five the past few games, but now that we have Ange [Kouame] here, we wanted to play Japeth a little bit more at four. Obviously, it didn’t work because we got off to a 17-1 start or something,” he explained.

Despite the defeat, the multiple-time PBA champion coach explained that these losses are valuable lessons on how they can adjust when they play similar competition in the upcoming 2023 FIBA World Cup in August.

“But the good thing is that’s part of why we’re here. To figure out different combinations, different line-ups, to know that, nothing is better, nothing is more powerful knowledge than experience,” he said.

The team will be up against the Dominican Republic, Angola, and Italy when the games start in August.

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“Not that we have that first-hand experience, we should now all know better. That’s part of the learning process and the lessons that we came here to learn.”

Reyes also added that he wants to know how the team’s defense will react depending on the different play styles that their opponents will use on them.

“This was all part of the process. We wanted to play a team who has five shooters because we wanted to see how we could get Junemar [Fajardo] defending ball screens, pick and pops, against three-point shooters,” Reyes said.

“We saw what happened, Junemar had 10 points in the first half, but his man had 20 points, so that’s something that we need to work on. It’s an area that, unless we really experience it, then we won’t really know how to address it,” he continued.

“It’s now upon us to come into practice and figure out ways to defend when we have a situation like that, when there’s a three-point shooting, outside shooting big man on the opposing team. Those are the things that we wanted to learn. That’s why we played a team like this because we knew that these are the kind of players that we’re going to face. It’s not only Junemar, it has to be everyone helping out, rotating, and being able to stop that.”

Gilas played relatively well on the offensive end, even only committing nine turnovers on top of 21 assists the whole game, but Reyes said that it was not enough for them to win games.

“Offense wasn’t our problem in this ball game, it was really defense,” he said. “We’re going to have games like this, where we are scoring really well but we cannot stop the other team. We have to find that balance where we are scoring well and we are really defending well.”

“Obviously, we’re not happy with the result but I’m very satisfied with the learning, with the lessons that we picked up. Like I said [before], that’s why we came here,” he concluded.

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