The 2015 Fiba Asia Championships are going on in China, and the winner of the tournament goes to the Rio 2016 Olympics.

For several Asian countries, that would be a big deal. For China. For Iran. For Lebanon and Japan. Each of them is serious, most of the time, about the game.

But for one Asian country, winning the Asian championship would be a monstrous, enormous, life-changing event.

That would be the Philippines, where hoops is the national sport, and winning this tournament would set off national celebrations.

In some ways, basketball in the Philippines is an odd concept. The average Filipino is not a tall person, and basketball is about showing up with at least three or four guys somewhere north of 6-foot-6.

Yet, Filipinos love the game, perhaps the most widely embraced bit of American culture left over from U.S. colonial days.

If we are going to deal in two sports stereotypes, pertaining to Filipinos, they would be these: They love Manny Pacquaio; and they all love basketball, including Manny.

About 500,000 Filipinos live and work in the UAE, and you sometimes can see them, here in Abu Dhabi, but especially in Dubai, in small groups, on the weekend, with someone carrying a basketball.

It is a country that knows about the NBA. It is a country that knows no Filipino has played in the NBA — but that one has coached in the league, the Miami Heat’s Erik Spoelstra, whose mother is a Filipino.

The country has a successful league, the Philippine Basketball Association, which is organized in a particularly complex way.

Some of the team names are quite fun, because sponsors are not at all shy about getting their names out there, front and center. Three of my favorites are … the Talk ‘N Text Tropang Texters, the San Miguel Beermen and the Rain or Shine Elasto Painters.

So, we here in the UAE, given the Filipino population among us, pay some attention to Philippines basketball, as well as Asia basketball, even if the UAE itself is currently not a significant force on the continent.

And one of our staff, an American named Jonathan Raymond, pays fairly close attention to this and has done a sprawling preview of the quarter-finals of the tournament for The National’s website.

And, if you are a Gilas Pilipinas (proud Filipinos) fan and want to get directly to your team, look about halfway down on this file.

You probably already know how you did in the big game with Lebanon.

Even if the Philippines fails to win the tournament, not all is lost.

In July, 18 teams who didn’t qualify for an Olympic spot from their continental tournaments will have another chance to get into the Olympics — via three six-team tournaments. Winner of each of the three tournaments also goes to Rio 2016.

The excitement about hoops in the Philippines pretty much never stops.