You almost have to feel sorry for Frankie Lim, who has worked tirelessly since taking over the management of Smart Gilas lining up import prospects for national team coach Rajko Toroman. Lim, if various newspaper reports were to be believed, was days away from coming to terms with prospect Dwayne Jones before the D-League’s best rebounder was called up by the Phoenix Suns.

Lim’s import search had been extensive, so much so that the excellent D-League blog Ridiculous Upside even wrote a snarky post titled, “Want to play for the Filipino National Team? Be tall, play in the D-League.”

What struck me about Lim’s efforts was just how ambitious it was. Consider the profile of the past two Smart Gilas imports. CJ Giles, while an exciting athletic prospect, had a lot of baggage and didn’t exactly tear the D-League apart. Sampson, on the other hand, just happened to be in Asia looking to sign in China when he was called in by Gilas. As talented as these guys were, their NBA prospects were pretty slim; the gulf between them and the Association was as wide as the Pacific Ocean.

In contrast, the guys Toroman and Lim had been looking at this past couple of months had been on the cusp of making it to the big show. One prospect, Courtney Sims was far and away the D-League’s best player last season, earning looks from teams like Phoenix and New York. Those same teams snagged up Jones and another prospect, former Red Bull import Earl Barron, late this season. It takes a lot of chutzpah for Lim to come in and tell those guys to eschew their NBA dreams to come play for Gilas.

It almost worked too, in the case of Jones, and that would have been a major coup for the efforts of the the Gilas build-up for the 2011 Fiba-Asia qualifier for the London Olympics. Jones was far and away the best big man in the D-League this season, beasting for 16 rebounds per game on top of 17.6 points. To compare, the next best rebounder in the D-League, Brian Butch, only grabs 11.9 boards per. (Butch has also since been called up to the NBA, signing with the Denver Nuggets.)

Valley of the Suns took a close look at Jones’s game and how he would fit alongside Steve Nash and company, and how he might help mitigate the loss of starting center Robin Lopez to injury:

On the scoring side of those double-doubles, Jones averaged 17.6 points per game while not a focal point of the offense for Austin. As the screener on pick-and-roll situations, Jones set solid picks while not normally looked at on the roll.

The majority of his points came from offensive rebounds, where he averaged over six per game, and free throws. Jones doesn’t have a go-to move in the low post, but his knack for drawing fouls is uncanny. I’ve thought before that Jones’ game is perfect for a big man rounding out an NBA team’s bench.

One has to wonder, in fact, what took Jones this long to catch on with a team. Earlier this season, two teams, the Portland Trailblazers and the Dallas Mavericks, brought Jones in for a tryout, and neither seemed impressed enough with the center to bring him in. That left the door momentarily open for Lim to come in with the Gilas offer.

Jones failing to make either team could be a red flag, or a red herring. Mark from Sham Sports even cracked, “I'm starting to think Dwayne Jones walks into workouts and shits all over GM's desks. He should have had a multi year NBA career by now.” On the odd chance that there really was something off with Jones, then hey, maybe Gilas dodged a bullet.

Meanwhile, reports now say that the team is looking at bringing in Sims, who just finished a stint in Puerto Rico. I hope that Lim finally settles the import search, both for his sake because he has worked so hard at this, and for the sake of the team’s Internet fanboys, because they die a little inside every time there’s more bad news about the team’s buildup.

At the rate we’re going, we might end up naturalizing ‘the Incredible Bulk’ Shawn Daniels for Smart Gilas. I don’t think the fanboys will be too happy about that but me? I think it’d be AWESOME.