MANILA – Gilas Pilipinas 3×3 team had a not-so-good start in the 2021 FIBA 3×3 Olympic Qualifying Tournament after bowing down to Qatar (21-12) and Slovenia (21-11) on Wednesday evening at Hauptplatz in Graz, Austria.
The Joshua Munzon, Jaymar Perez, Moala Tautuaa, and Leonard Santillan-led Gilas team struggled early against Qatar, with the latter surging to a 7-0 start behind Nedim Muslic.
Gilas’ Santillan and Munzon trimmed the deficit at 5-10, but Qatar leaned on the exploits of Muslic and Seydou Ndoye to widen the gap further to 14-6 midway through the game.
Perez tried his best to lift the Gilas back into the game, but Abdulrahman Saad was blazing with consecutive outside hits for a 19-11 lead. Muslic then wrapped up the game with a two-pointer.
Against Slovenia later in the day, the Ronnie Magsanoc-mentored Gilas was a disappointment as their opponent crawled to a 15-3 advantage behind Gašper Ovnik and Simon Finzgar.
Munzon attempted to keep the national men’s basketball team afloat, but Slovenia kept blowing by the defense of Gilas’ Tautuaa for easy buckets before Ovnik and Finzgar sealed the deal for Slovenia with their freebies.
With the defeat, Gilas Pilipinas is at the cellar of Pool C with a 0-2 win-loss slate, complicating their bid to represent the country in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The team, however, is not yet out of the woods as they still have remaining games today against the Dominican Republic at 5:50 p.m. and France at 7:55 in the evening.
Only the top two teams of each of the four groups will move on to the knockout stage, where the winner of the semis and third-place games will book a slot for the Summer Games.
In the event of a tiebreaker, points scored will be used to determine the teams which will progress to the next phase. The Philippines currently has a total of 23 points after two games./PN
