Philippine basketball

PBA relaxes rules on Fil-foreigners for next draft

Delfin Dioquino

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PBA relaxes rules on Fil-foreigners for next draft

FILIPINO BLOOD. PBA teams will be allowed to have a maximum for seven Filipino-foreigners starting next season.

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The PBA tweaks its eligibility rules for Filipino-foreigners, who now only need a Philippine passport to qualify for the draft

More Filipino-foreigners are expected to see action in the PBA next season.

The PBA relaxed its eligibility rules for Fil-foreigners, who would now only need to acquire a Philippine passport to qualify for the draft.

“We will basically look at Fil-foreigners less stringently now,” said PBA chairman Ricky Vargas during the Philippine Sportswriters Association online forum on Tuesday, November 9.

“As long as they have Filipino blood and they can get their passports and they are able to come and play for us, we will look at them with less rules to disqualify them,” he added.

The PBA also tweaked the maximum number of Fil-foreigners for each team from five to seven for the 2022 season.

“In that way, we’ll make the PBA exciting,” said Vargas.

For years, the PBA required Fil-foreigners to submit documents from the Department of Justice and Bureau of Immigration to become draft-eligible.

Those proved to be the stumbling block for the likes of Filipino-Americans Jason Brickman, Jeremiah Gray, and Brandon Ganuelas-Rosser as they were ruled ineligible in the previous draft.

Brickman signed with the Kaohsiung Aquas in the T1 League in Taiwan, while Gray inked a deal to play for TNT in the inaugural PBA 3×3 season.

“We’ll bring the world to the PBA just like the NBA but at the same time, [we’re] trying to balance it so that we’re able to give jobs to our [local] players,” Vargas said in a mix of Filipino and English.

“We understand that a lot of Fil-foreigners are interested in coming over and playing for the PBA,” he added. – Rappler.com

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Delfin Dioquino

Delfin Dioquino dreamt of being a PBA player, but he did not have the skills to make it. So he pursued the next best thing to being an athlete – to write about them. He took up journalism at the University of Santo Tomas and joined Rappler as soon as he graduated in 2017.