I heard rumors about this but it seems like the PBA are not interested with it. Although I believe they already know that the league is losing popularity, they still keep the current set up of teams, and worst it looks like one farm team is confirm added.
They will loss control if they will allow that. And in most industry, they already have business. If they will open for more teams, maybe other liquor businesses will also join and create their team, that would be competiting on their business. Ginebra and SMB are very popular in the Philippines, they own majority of the market so why would they allow their competitors to be popular?If the PBA would like a change, they need to replace the higher management as I believe they are working just like a puppet, it's still MVP and SMB who are controlling the league, so they have the final say. If there's TNT, will they allow globe? I doubt.
Have you observe that when coach Chot was still in charge on Gilas, most of the players are from TNT, now that Tim Cone is the coach, he's also getting the SMB players, but the good thing is they won a championship, so people did not complain on that.
That's given I guess because it's not the league that are supporting our national team since they cannot afford it. As we can see on the international games, they are wearing the company name of either TNT or SMB, depending who help them in that competition. So yes, there's a big influence by these giant owners to dictate the officials of the league, and that influence will continue as long as there's no changes on the current rules and set up.
Without MVP and SMB, this league might also not be able to give a decent salary to its players, because I believe that once a player sign with the SMB or MVP team, they are given bigger salalry compared to other teams. They say there's a salary cap but it was only on paper, it was not implemented.
