With the Philippine Basketball Association’s 45th season in limbo due to global COVID-19 pandemic, and with no assurance when the health issue can be put to rest, Asia’s first professional cage league perhaps may want to consider a two-conference format – instead of the traditional three – for the 2020-21 campaign.
If so, this won’t be unprecedented.
In 1981, only a pair of conferences were staged – the Open Conference and Reinforced Filipino Conference, which were won by Toyota and Crispa, respectively. The two clubs provided the fiercest rivalry in Philippine commercial basketball history since the epic Yco-Ysmael Steel battles from the mid-1950s through the 1960s.
On a side note, in the midst of a financial crisis (capital flight) following the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr. in August 1983, the PBA came up with three conferences in 1984 all right – but two of them were All-Filipino (the last was an Invitational) to save on precious dollars often paid to league imports.
Then again there was the transition period that produced only two conferences each for five straight years from the 2005-06 season through the 2009-10 season – the Fiesta Conference and Philippine Cup (or All-Filipino).
Since the time, it has been a three-conference format – Philippine Cup, Commissioner’s Cup and Governors’ Cup.
But extraordinary times call for extraordinary solutions.
And in extraordinary times such as now, when the enemy (coronavirus) is invisible – and invincible – the PBA, for the time being, revert to the two-conference format.
The virus, a to-whom-it-may-concern contagion, is violently calling the shots right now. It is the virus that dictates the pace of the ball game (timetable). Not even the medical scientists can predict when this epidemic to vanish.
Even if the latest extension of the Enhance Community Quarantine (ECQ) concludes at 11:59 p.m. of April 30, Karlo Nograles, the AITF spokesman for the COVID-19 crisis, says people will have to continue to adjust to the “new normal” for the next six months – meaning that there still should be no mass gathering and the wearing of face masks and the practice of social (or physical) distancing must remain – until a vaccine is discovered by medical scientists next year.
And that is not even to say that the flattening of the COVID-19 curve will have been accomplished by April 30.
That can only mean that the game of basketball, being a physical, contact sport that values defense even if a no-hand-check rule is in place, will be in for an extended hibernation.
Quo vadis, basketball (for a long time?).
In case you want to know, the PBA first saw the light of day on April 9, 1975 with a pair of games at the Araneta Coliseum.
On the Day of Valor (Araw ng Kagitingan), a “red-colored” holiday in the country, an estimated crowd of 18,000 witnessed Mariwasa Noritake beating Concepcion Carrier, 101-98, and Toyota defeating Universal Textiles, 105-101, in a pair of nail-biters.
Though he played on the losing side, gold medal-winning national teamer to the 1972 Asian Youth competitions Gregorio (Joy) Dionisio, a 5-10 guard for Concepcion, carved his name in the PBA record books as the first player ever to make a field goal in the league.
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