Voice-cloned video falsely claims NBA coach planned to recruit late Filipino basketball player
- Published on August 6, 2026 at 09:44
- Updated on August 6, 2026 at 10:28
- 2 min read
- By Lucille SODIPE, AFP Philippines
The death of young Filipino basketball player Rene Baterbonia at a training camp in June unleashed scores of content online, including a TikTok post falsely claiming that an NBA coach had planned to recruit the 18-year-old for the 2026-27 season. AFP found that the clip had been digitally altered, while the original video was published before Baterbonia's death.
"OKC Thunder coach planned to recruit Rene Baterbonia after seeing his potential during his basketball games," the overlaid Tagalog-language text on a TikTok clip reads.
The post has racked up over 869,000 views since it was published on July 20. It claims Baterbonia "would've been the first pure Filipino to join the NBA".
The TikTok video shows Mark Daigneault, head coach of the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder (OKC Thunder), speaking at a press conference (archived link).
Daigneault can be heard saying they planned to draft Baterbonia, an 18-year-old college student at Ateneo De Manila University, before he died (archived here and here).
"Over the past year, our scouts closely followed Rene Baterbonia and were impressed by his talent, work ethic, and potential," he appears to say in the clip.
"Internally, we were preparing to select him in the 2026 to 2027 NBA draft and had even discussed a multi-year contract worth approximately 25 million US dollars."
"Unfortunately, events took an unexpected turn, and those plans will never become real."
Social media users shared the same clip on TikTok and Facebook, after Baterbonia and teammate Divine Adili drowned during a team-building exercise in the eastern Philippines on June 8 (archived link).
Their deaths and the subsequent investigation by authorities unleashed a frenzy of social media posts about Baterbonia, a promising small-town athlete recently recruited into collegiate basketball.
Officials from his hometown of Talacogon in Mindanao island released a statement on July 30, asking the public to stop soliciting financial assistance for the Baterbonia family and to stop posting visits to the basketball player's grave for content (archived link).
But this video has been altered and the original YouTube video was published on May 31, eight days before Baterbonia's death.
A reverse image search using the clip's keyframes found the original unedited version of the video published on the OKC Thunder's official YouTube channel (archived link).
The video's description reads: "Head Coach Mark Daigneault speaks with the media at end-of-season interviews."
Daigneault made no mention of Baterbonia in the entirety of the video.
A close inspection of the altered footage found that Daigneault's mouth did not match the audio.
Using the Hiya detection tool within the Verification Plugin found the clip's audio was "very likely AI-generated".
AFP has previously debunked misinformation about Rene Baterbonia.
This story has been updated to fix wording in the summaryAugust 6, 2026 This story has been updated to fix wording in the summary
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