Bacolod is known as for its Masskara Festival, a festival born, as the story goes, out of tragedy where the city chose to smile through hardship rather than be defined by it. The city also has an MPBL team, the Bacolod Masskara, and on Tuesday against the Bulacan Kuyas, it removed the mask and revealed a sorry mix of incompetence and indifference (and maybe even something more sinister).
For the final 7:48 of a 100-64 loss, the Bacolod Masskara did not make a single field goal. Not one. Six turnovers, four missed free throws, and a stretch so aimless the team nearly got hit with a shot-clock violation four separate times. Bulacan closed the game on a 19-0 run that Bacolod didn’t so much lose as hand over, possession by possession, like a team that had already checked out of its own game.
Numbers Don’t Lie, and Neither Does the Tape
This wasn’t an isolated bad half. The Bacolod Masskara have now been on the losing end of an 84-point blowout to Abra, a 52-point defeat to Quezon, a 51-point defeat to Bataan, and this latest 36-point humbling by Bulacan. These are four separate occasions this season where the final margin wasn’t a loss so much as a public humiliation.
Even the broadcast couldn’t hide its exasperation on Tuesday. MPBL lead commentator Cedelf Tupas—who is, awkwardly enough, a proud son of Bacolod himself—openly wondered aloud whether he needed to stop covering the team’s games because of the toll on his blood pressure. When your own hometown broadcaster is coaching your players through the TV screen out of sheer frustration, the problem has stopped being basketball and started being something closer to an institutional failure.
A League That Has Seen This Movie Before
This is the part that should worry Manny Pacquiao and the rest of the MPBL brass most: none of this is unprecedented. The league banned 21 members of the Socksargen Marlins, owners included, back in 2019 after an 18-game losing streak drew match-fixing suspicion. In 2024, the league tried to clean house wholesale, handing down bans to 47 players and coaches. Just last month, it revoked the Iloilo United Royals’ franchise outright over unpaid salaries and abandoned obligations.
The MPBL knows exactly what a credibility crisis looks like. It has lived through several of them. And yet here it is again, watching a franchise go scoreless for nearly eight minutes in a nationally broadcast game, with a commentator openly losing his composure on air and a fellow player publicly calling out the effort. If the league’s pattern of investigations and bans is any indication, scrutiny is coming for Bacolod. The only real question is whether scrutiny will be enough this time.
It shouldn’t be. The Bacolod Masskara’s body of work this season is not a case for a fine or a strongly worded statement. It’s a case for disbandment. A franchise that has spent an entire season making a mockery of competitive basketball, and that has now done so in front of a viral audience, has forfeited the benefit of the doubt that keeps a team’s franchise intact.
In other words, the Bacolod Masskara might have to go.
The Concept Deserves Better Than This
Here’s what makes all of this so maddening: the MPBL, at its core, is a genuinely good idea. A province-based league, built to give basketball to towns and cities that will never see a PBA franchise, is exactly the kind of grassroots infrastructure Philippine basketball has needed for years. It is the rare good idea in Philippine sports that actually got built.
But a good concept can only survive so many Bacolods. Every viral clip of a team going scoreless for an entire fourth quarter, every fresh ban, every revoked franchise chips away at the very thing the MPBL is trying to establish—that this is a real league, playing real basketball, and worth a province’s pride.
Pacquiao and the league’s leadership do not need another investigation into one bad quarter. They need a full accounting of how a franchise gets to four separate 35-plus-point losses in a single season, whether Bacolod’s ownership has the resources or the will to actually compete, and whether the answer this time is a ban, a fine, or the franchise’s outright removal from the league.
The mask fell on Tuesday night. The Bacolod Masskara showed the league—and a viral audience far beyond it—exactly what was underneath. The only question left is whether the MPBL is finally ready to stop looking away.
