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Let me ask you a question, and I want you to really think about it: Are we sure the Macau Giant Pandas know they are a professional basketball team?
I was texting with a buddy during the game on Wednesday night, staring at the box score from the Ninoy Aquino Stadium, and my brain completely short-circuited. 138-78. Let that marinate for a second. Sixty points. SIX-TY. The NLEX Road Warriors didn’t just beat Macau; they vaporized them. They turned a guest team into a historical cautionary tale, breaking the all-time PBA record for the largest margin of victory (eclipsing Rain or Shine’s 56-point massacre of Blackwater just a few months ago).
This wasn’t a basketball game. This was like the '86 Celtics showing up to play against a local YMCA team that had just eaten a heavy lunch.
When the PBA announced they were bringing in the Macau Giant Pandas as a guest team for Season 50, I was incredibly skeptical. It felt like one of those ideas that sounds great in a boardroom—“Expansion! International flavor! Regional synergy!”—but immediately falls apart the second real professional basketball players step onto the hardwood.
And now, here we are. Macau has officially tainted their franchise forever.
The big question mark for every single fan watching this unmitigated disaster unfold is simple: Why did they take the risk? What exactly was the endgame here? What did the Giant Pandas actually get out of embarrassing themselves historically in the PBA?
Look at the sheer absurdity of their situation. During the PBA's long break, Macau lost four of their best guys—Damian Chongqui, Ramon Cao, Jenning Leung, and their import De’Vondre Perry—because they all just randomly signed with different teams playing in the East Asia Super League. They literally treated the PBA like a summer league pit stop. So, the Pandas rolled into Wednesday’s game with exactly nine players in uniform. Nine! My daughter’s youth soccer team has better roster depth.
But it gets better.
Their actual head coach, Marcus Elliot, was suddenly MIA in the United States dealing with a "personal matter." So, what does Macau do? They tap former Terrafirma coach Raymond Tiongco on the shoulder hours before tip-off against the best team in Group A and say, "Hey man, you're up."
Tiongco’s post-game quotes are the stuff of legend. He basically sounded like a substitute teacher who was asked to teach AP Physics with zero lesson plan. “Nagulat nga ako, e... Helper lang ako dito. Tumutulong lang ako.” (I was surprised... I'm just a helper here. Just helping out.) You can't even blame the guy! He was shoved into the captain's chair of the Titanic after it had already snapped in half.
The sad part is, this is a permanent stain. When you lose by 60 points in a professional league, that stench doesn't wash off. It follows you on Wikipedia pages, in record books, and in YouTube compilation videos for the rest of eternity. Macau sacrificed their entire organizational dignity to essentially act as a glorified scrimmage squad for NLEX's new import Deonte Burton (who casually dropped 22 points, 14 boards, 8 assists, and 6 steals while barely breaking a sweat).
At 2-7, they are sitting at the absolute bottom of Group A with three games left against Terrafirma, Converge, and defending champion TNT. Tiongco already hinted he probably won't even coach the remaining games. Who knows if Elliot is ever coming back.
The Macau experiment is officially a disaster. They came to the PBA looking for international exposure, and instead, they got exposed in the most humiliating way possible. Next time a foreign club wants to jump into the PBA as a guest, they better look at that 138-78 scoreboard and ask themselves if the juice is really worth the squeeze.
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