'Massacro'

“A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That's how I want you to play.”
--Mike Krzyzewski

By Alex P. Vidal

IT is not news if we lose a game in the FIBA Basketball World Cup.
It is always expected since the tournament romped off in 1950.
Fans should refrain from bellyaching and finger-pointing.
We are not hypocrites to convince ourselves we can beat the logistically superior Goliaths of basketball from other continents.
What’s news is if we upset any team from Europe and America.
Another news--embarrassing it may seem--is if we lose by a mile or what the Italian pundits call as “massacro” or massacre like when Italy shamed the Philippines on Saturday, 108-62, in China.
It’s okay to lose, but, please, go down or get drowned with dignity by bringing their slippers to the deepest sea.
As they say in Italy, “Ridiamo per non piangere” or we laugh in order not to cry.
In the 2014 FIBA World Cup in Seville, Spain, Gilas Pilipinas did better despite suffering only hair-line defeats to Argentina, Croatia and Puerto Rico
And, hurray, we beat Senegal.

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Sports supremacy is always measured by the country’s economic standing.
If you’re an economically struggling country from the Third World but happens to qualify in the World Cup or the Olympic Games like the Philippines, chances are you will be blown away by countries considered as economic super powers like Italy, Spain, USA, Russia, China, Serbia.
While poor countries have limited financial support for their athletes’ training, rich countries pamper their athletes and shower them with enormous financial and material assistance.
Even in the Olympic Games, the dominant countries are always those that dominate the world economy: USA, Russia, China, Japan, Germany, Korea, Great Britain, Canada.

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Can we ever see again a Philippine basketball team in the World Cup where all cagers are pure Filipinos?
While we are happy for team Gilas Pilipinas, we really didn’t expect the 2014 FIBA Asia Cup third placer, the stage was different when the all-Filipino RP basketball team competed in the 1954 FIBA World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and won the bronze medal.
In the 1954 FIBA World Cup (known at that time as the 2nd World Basketball Championship), the RP team did not have an Andray Blatche, center-forward of the Brooklyn Nets, recruited abroad to reinforce the Gilas Pilipinas.
We sent to Rio our best home-grown basketball players and we did not have to scout for naturalized reinforcements from the United States and Europe.

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And we were so proud to see the brown cagers demolish Formosa (48-38), Israel (90-56), Canada (83-76), and Uruguay (67-63) through the heroics of Carlos “The Big Difference” M. Loyzaga.
We lost only to the eventual champion United States (43-56) and second placer Brazil (41-57) but it was our greatest moment in world basketball championship.
Loyzaga, who turned 84 last August 29, is widely regarded as the greatest Pinoy cager of his era, being the most dominant basketball star from the 1950s to the early 1960s.
A two-time Olympian (1952, 1956), Loyzaga helped the country become one of the best in the world at the time, winning four consecutive Asian Games gold medals (1951, 1954, 1958, 1962) and two consecutive FIBA Asia Championships (1960, 1963).
The country’s third place was the best finish by an Asian country and the Philippines have remained the only Asian medalist in the tournament until today.
To add prestige to our 1954 FIBA World Cup campaign, Loyzaga wound up as one of the tournament’s leading scorers with average of 16.4 points-per-game.
The Filipino player was named in the tournament's All-Star selection.
Nowadays it’s hard to duplicate Loyzaga’s achievements. We can produce a lot of promising cage stars from colleges and universities all over the country inspired by the performance of Gilas Pilipinas. But we can’t probably produce another Loyzaga in the next 50 years.
Truly, what happened in Rio did not happen in Seville and won’t happen in China. With basketball in other European, North and Central America improving by leaps and bounds, it will probably never happen again.
(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)

Duterte isn’t LeBron James

“I never imagined myself doing a one-man show. If I'm going to do one, I'd rather do one that breaks all the rules.”
-- Steffan Rhodri

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- We don’t expect President Rodrigo Duterte to single-handedly solve the myriad of problems we are facing today in the Philippines.
He isn’t superman who can put all the bad guys inside the calaboose (although he was the one who promised to get rid of the criminals in six months) in a specific period.
He isn’t LeBron James, 33, who can carry the Cleveland Cavaliers to a scintillating victory in any NBA finals even if he will use only one arm.
When we think that our president is like LeBron James, we lose psychologically or we end up frustrated.
When we think the president can succeed if key agencies and other branches of government will chip in and function effectively and efficiently, President Duterte’s work rate produces magical results.
How the LeBron James-inspired Cavaliers turned the tide and won the Eastern Conference championship after a dismal 0-2 start in the the best of seven series, should serve as a lesson to any leadership in and outside the hard court.

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Before clinching the Eastern Conference championship in Game 7 for the Cavs’ eight straight trip to NBA finals on May 27, their Game 5 debacle against Boston Celtics was blamed heavily on their reliance on LeBron James, who played all 48 minutes, had the monster game the Cavs needed from him: 35 points, 15 rebounds and nine assists in Game 7 played in Boston.
Game 7 was won in the enemy court mainly because the Cavs realized the showdown against Boston Celtics shouldn’t be a one-man show.
I won’t pretend to be an expert NBA analyst, but here’s what happened, according to USA Today:
1. James had just enough help. George Hill and J.R. Smith were scoreless in the first quarter. Kyle Korver missed his first four three-pointers. Larry Nance Jr. collected three fouls and attempted an ill-advised three-pointer in his first four minutes on the court. It was an ugly start for the Cavs, who missed 13 of their first 14 three-point attempts, and trailed 35-23 with 8:52 left in the first quarter.
Cleveland looked exhausted and ill-suited to take Game 7 on the road. But the Cavs hung in there, cut Boston’s lead to 43-39 at halftime and had a 69-66 lead with 8:53 left in the fourth quarter.
Smith finished with 12 points, and Korver hit a necessary three-pointer. Tristan Thompson added 10 points and nine rebounds
2. Cavs go Green without Love. Cleveland All-Star forward-center Kevin Love missed Game 7 with concussion-like symptoms. He sustained the injury in the first quarter of Game 6 when he collided head to head with Boston’s Jayson Tatum.
His absence was felt. Though Love didn’t have a great series against the Celtics, he provided a scoring threat for which Boston had to account.
However, Jeff Green started in place of Love and delivered with 19 points and eight rebounds.
3. The old man and the rook. Rookie Jayson Tatum, who passed Elgin Baylor for third place on the rookie playoff scoring list, is a special player in the making.
He scored 13 of his team-high 24 points in the second half. Tatum had a dunk on LeBron James and followed it with a three-pointer giving Boston a 72-71 lead midway through the fourth quarter. He lived up to the moment.
Emblematic of this series, Al Horford played well at home and poorly on the road. He had 17 points.
However, Boston shot just 34.1 percent from the field and 17.9% on three-pointers.
4. Cavs three-point shooting. When Cleveland makes threes, it has a chance. When the Cavs don’t make threes, they’re in trouble, and that was the case in the first half of Game 7. Cleveland made just 2-for-17 three-pointers, including several open looks in the first two quarters.
But the Cavs made just enough threes-- two more than Boston--despite shooting 25.7 percent from that distance.