The PBA was right to send Macau home. It would be wrong to close the guest seat with them

Macau's PBA stay ended on Friday night in Antipolo with a 162-108 loss to Converge. Earlier in the week, PBA commissioner Willie Marcial had already said what comes next for the Giant Pandas. "No more," he said. They will not be invited back.

He is right. I said last Tuesday that a guest team should keep its roster for a whole conference or lose its seat, and Macau could not keep theirs. But I want to be clear about the next step, because it is easy to get wrong. Sending Macau home is the right call. Closing the door on guest teams would be the wrong one.

How it ended

After the break, Macau played four games and lost all four: 138-78 to NLEX, 146-127, 142-87 to TNT and 162-108 to Converge. That is 188 points in four games, 47 a game. The 60-point loss to NLEX is the biggest winning margin in PBA history. They finished the Governors' Cup at 2-10.

Before the break they were 2-6 and losing by about 16 a game, which is a weak team, not a broken one. What changed was the roster. In my column last Tuesday I listed what Macau lost during the break: their import, De'Vondre Perry, and three regular players. No league can promise a fair contest when one of its teams changes that much in the middle of a conference.

The case for closing the door

Here is the best argument against me, and it is a good one. A 12-team league is simpler. Every game counts the same way for every club, nobody's seeding depends on whether they drew a guest team before or after it fell apart, and the schedule has fewer moving parts. Bay Area, Hong Kong and Macau each played and left. Why keep trying?

My answer is that the format was never the problem. The terms were. Macau's results before the break looked like plenty of PBA seasons. The scores after it came from a team that had lost its import and three regular players. A rule can stop that. A ban only stops the good guests along with the bad.

The good guest

In the 2022-23 Commissioner's Cup, the Bay Area Dragons reached the Finals and took Barangay Ginebra to Game 7, which Ginebra won 114-99 on January 15, 2023. A guest team pushed Ginebra to the last game of a Finals. To me, that series is still the best reason to keep inviting teams from abroad.

What the next invitation should say

The same three conditions I asked for last Tuesday:

• The roster at the start of the conference stays, apart from injuries and one import change.
• A guest team dresses at least 12 players for every game.
• If it breaks either promise, it does not come back.

Add one more now that we have seen the end of this: an invitation should be for one conference at a time. A guest who is good gets asked back. A guest who is not goes home after one conference, not after two.

My prediction

This is a prediction, not a fact: the PBA will invite another guest team within two seasons, because the Bay Area Finals showed fans want it. I will be wrong if the next two seasons pass with only the league's own 12 teams.

Macau did not prove that guest teams fail. They proved that a guest seat with no conditions fails. Keep the seat. Write the conditions. And the first team to sign them should be one that wants to play Ginebra in a Game 7, not one that is happy to lose by 60.