I rushed to the Ninoy Aquino Stadium tonight after a long day of work in the field just in time for the tipoff of Smart Gilas versus the Jordan national team. Gilas actually played well in the first half, taking a first quarter lead and keeping in step with the taller Jordanians at halftime.

But Jordan, the bronze medal winner at last year’s Fiba-Asia championship, stepped up its attack in the third quarter, taking a 58-50 lead at the end of the period. They turned the game into a laugher in the fourth quarter, using a 15-4 run to take a 19-point lead before Gilas rallied to make the score respectable, 83-75.

Like most of the other fans in the stadium, I ended up drenched after the game, adding insult to injury. It always sucks to watch a team with the words “Pilipinas” across the chest losing.

Some thoughts on the game:

• Marcus Douthit twisted his ankle in the second quarter, which could have affected his performance, even after he returned later. But my first impression is that he’s solid, but not as talented or explosive as CJ Giles.


• Gilas’ best five was its small-ball lineup with Jayvee Casio, Chris Tiu, Marcio Lassiter, Mac Baracael, and Greg Slaughter after Douthit went down. Lassiter, Baracael, and Casio hit several three-pointers to keep Gilas in the game.


• Slaughter was especially impressive. He wasn’t exactly smooth, but he played solid man-to-man and help defense, and ran the floor well. He even had a two-handed follow-up dunk on the break.


• On the flip side, I’m worried about the rest of the guys in the rotation. Chris Lutz looks like he hasn’t adjusted to the system yet, while Mark Barroca, Dylan Ababou, and Japeth Aguilar looked very tentative, like they were worried about being yanked from the game by Coach Rajko Toroman if they missed a shot or were late on a defensive rotation. It’s like they’re constantly looking over their shoulder to see if someone’s going to the scorer’s table to check in for them.


• Actually, Aguilar deserves his own bullet point. His confidence is just completely shattered, and Toroman looks like he’s much, much, much more comfortable having the 6’3” Baracael out there at power forward instead of the 6’10” Aguilar. With seconds to go before the end of the third quarter, Toroman took out Aguilar, and the coach started screaming at the player’s face, ignoring the rest of the action until the buzzer sounded. Japeth didn’t even look like he was listening anymore, just walking to the very end of the bench. He never returned, as Toroman went with the twin tower combination of Douthit and Slaughter.
  
  The Gilas management might want to consider shipping Aguilar out of the team, perhaps to Talk N Text as replacement for Kelly Williams. Maybe, with nurturing from Chot Reyes and Norman Black, Aguilar’s confidence can be nursed back to health and his immense potential could still be salvaged.


• Gilas needs to improve its zone offense; Jordan went on its big run by playing a 2-3 zone.


• If Williams and Ryan Reyes end up joining Smart Gilas, they’d be taking the minutes of Aguilar and Barroca, ironically the two guys we all thought would be carrying the team last year.


• Near the end of the game, Gilas got a steal and passed ahead to Jayvee Casio, who muffed a fastbreak floater in the lane against Rasheim Wright. Toroman got in his face and started screaming about Casio’s miss, gesturing wildly for a while about how Casio should have done it.
  
  There are two ways to look at this sequence. One is that Coach Rajko, ever the perfectionist, expects only the very best from his players. The other is that, well, that was a tough shot for Casio, and Toroman was being kind of a dick.


• If Jordan beats the Dongguan Leopards tomorrow, which they should, Gilas would have another shot at Jordan on Sunday.

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.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a curious source: Smart Gilas import Jamal Sampson. He took issue with an item I posted about his performance in China, where I quoted a ShamSports report calling him “a pretty awful offensive player.” Sampson said that during the season in question, when he averaged a paltry 10 points and 10 rebounds, he was playing with a hamstring injury. He also pointed out that in a previous season in China, he dominated the CBA, leading the Liaoning team to the finals, while averaging upwards of 20 points and 20 rebounds. One report on Eurobasket even called him “arguably the most expensive and impressive import in CBA history.”

Contrary to reports, Sampson said that he is still under contract with Smart Gilas, even as he is working to get a release, with a bigger offer in China waiting for him. In a series of emails to Fire Quinito, Sampson wrote about the problems he has encountered with Smart Gilas.

As always, this blog is open to any response from the SBP and Smart Gilas regarding this matter.

On his current situation:

“Under my contract, I got the month of February off, so I’m back home, but still under contract with [the SBP]. They won’t let me out of my contract, but I keep reading they wanna get rid of me. The team tried their hardest to convince me to stay and work it out, and try to make a deal work last week before I left. I’m still owed money from December, we are in February now, and I haven’t gotten it all.”

On the Middle East trip:

“While we were in Qatar, before we even went to Dubai, I asked to be released, and they told me they would, right after the Dubai trip, but that hasn’t happened.

“December’s payment that was owed to me was late. Under my contract, they owed me a payment by January 1st, no later, well before we left for Qatar and Dubai. If it wasn’t paid, my contract states that I didn’t have to play or practice. I wasn’t obligated to play in Qatar or Dubai.

“I tried to play through the injury because I like the guys on the team. They expected me to go out and risk my knee, while I haven’t even been paid from the first month. It’s February right now, and I’m still owed money I should have got in December from the first month I was on the team.”

On his contractual problems with the SBP:

“The team didn’t meet numerous contractual things. I had a bigger deal in China, but the team wanted to keep me so they kept upping their offer to meet, that’s why the process of me signing took so long. Unfortunately, from the beginning all those things put in the contract to get me to stay weren’t met, late and missed payments, and other things promised in the contract couldn’t be delivered.”

On issues with the SBP organization:

“You have a lot of people doing jobs that they are unqualified to be doing. The whole program is unorganized, and other people in the organization feel the same as me, and have told me it was gonna be like this from the beginning, but won’t speak up now ‘cause they don’t want to lose their job.

“For example, look at the assistant coaching staff, show me qualifications to be coaching a national team. What serious level coaching experience do they have? How is someone in their life under 5 feet who never played in the post in their life gonna be a big man coach and show me stuff? Someone under 5 feet can be a great coach, don’t get me wrong, but to be a big man coach and have never played in the post or even played high level ball? C’mon now.

“I asked to be released because I could see how unorganized and unprofessional it was. When you start off the first month not being paid right, that’s a tell-all. Stuff with my condo weren’t handled right. I slept on the floor in Manila for 5 days with no bed, that’s how unorganized things are.”

On SBP executive director Noli Eala’s motivation:

“I was told by numerous sources that on a team retreat Noli said to the team, he started this program only to get back at the PBA for what they did to him. That right there says enough. This whole thing wasn’t even started for the right reasons.”

On Coach Rajko Toroman:

“The players are treated like kids by Coach Toroman. Just like [former import] CJ [Giles] was blamed for taking the team out on a wild night. The players are from the age of 19 to 25, they are grown men, no one made them do anything. Toroman just goes by what the SBP tells him, he doesn’t know what happens behind the scenes, with payments and other contractual obligations not being met.”

UPDATE: A very interesting response from commenter Gilas Insider, who I know for a fact is a Gilas insider: “i don't like to say bad stuff bout Jamal cause he's my friend. It still is disappointing that he didn't play but of course when it comes to all these salary stuff, that's behind the scenes and we dont know much. BUt what i do know is that, it's not just him who doesn't get paid on time. Sometimes the other guys also don't get their salaries on time, and believe me, they need that salary more than he does, but that doesn't really keep them from playing.”

I know she’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I honestly enjoy Beth Celis’ work. She always plays the role of the ditz in her columns, but she also writes about a lot of things other writers just ignore; for example, she was the only writer who kept tabs on Rudy Distrito regularly over the last 5 years.

Today she writes about Al-Riyadi coach Fuad Abou Chakra, who’s in Manila to take in some PBA games, look for sports therapists, and potentially work on a program to send young players from Lebanon to the Philippines for training.

I found it interesting, because the strong relationship between some Lebanese and Filipino basketball communities has been a terribly underreported story. Lebanon’s national basketball team, in fact, has held its training camp prior to major international tournaments right here in Manila for the past three years.

Strengthening institutional linkages with other countries is something the Samahang Basketball ng Pilipinas and all its stakeholders, including the PBA, should work on. And no, it should go beyond Smart Gilas playing in a Dubai invitational tournament or Purefoods playing exhibition games in Qatar during the offseason.

For example, club teams from the Middle East play each other all the time, and as a result, all of them have improved considerably, and it does not diminish their respective domestic leagues. Meanwhile, there are fledgling basketball leagues in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, and yet teams from these countries’ leagues rarely play each other in tournaments that matter.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese coach was also all praises for the performance of erstwhile Smart Gilas import CJ Giles, whom his team signed to a three-year deal. Chakra, though, was fully aware of the problems that Giles’s behavior could cause. “He’s still the same CJ Giles with problems and emotional baggage on and off the court. The key was to find the right way to handle him,” he told Celis.