THERE are four pairs of sister teams in the Premier Volleyball League to date.
Within the 12-team field lies Rebisco-owned Creamline and Choco Mucho, Strong Group Athletics (SGA)-ran Farm Fresh and Zus Coffee, MVP Group’s Cignal and PLDT, as well Akari and Nxled.
READ: Farm Fresh trio moved to ZUS in another PVL sister-team transfer?
The only four independent teams? Champion squads Petro Gazz and Chery Tiggo alongside neophyte teams Capital1 and Galeries Tower.
While the PBA no longer permits sister-team transfers in pro basketball, this hasn’t been the case as of late in the PVL.
Why?
Year of the sister teams
In this calendar year alone, three of the PVL’s four sister-team duos engaged in either multiple-player transfers or trades.
It was back in January when former Choco Mucho stars Bea de Leon and Denden Lazaro-Revilla jumped ship in a pair of high-profile moves to Creamline.
Then came a controversial Akari-Nxled mega-trade involving eight players and both head coaches in May.
The controversial sister-team shuffle got the green light from the PVL following a ‘heated’ vote from the league’s five-person management team.
This won’t be the last of it all as news filtered out of an offseason transfer by Farm Fresh trio Kate Santiago, Joan Narit and Chinnie Arroyo move to Zus Coffee.
No rules yet
Shortly after news of Akari and Nxled’s swap broke out, PVL president Ricky Palou shared that the league was in the process of drafting rules that will disallow sister-team transactions for good.
“We will not allow sister teams to trade with each other. We will not allow ‘yung conduits, like (for example) they want this player, then force her to come to their sister team, then force them to their team. We won’t allow that,” Palou told SPIN.ph in May.
But in the case of Farm Fresh and Zus Coffee nearly five months since, there’s one particular loose end that may just pave the way for the former Foxies to now become Thunderbelles.
At present, league rules on transfers and free agency - as well as the most important rule banning transactions between sister teams - have yet to be handed down in consultation with team owners.
That's exactly why the Zus Coffee-Farm Fresh transaction will likely be approved.
According to sources, the SGA group has informed the league that the Farm Fresh contracts of Santiago, Narit, and Arroyo have already expired at the end of the season-ending Invitational Conference last month.
And it simply became a matter of Zus Coffee picking up their signing rights as no league rule can technically stop them from doing so.
In the case of the PBA, where alleged collusion among sister teams has become a perennial problem, there is still a rule that any free agent will have to be waived by all the league member squas before he can join a sister team.
Unfortunately, the PVL still has no such rules in place.
Contacted for comment, Sports Vision president Ricky Palou admitted that in the absence of free-agency rules, the transfers to Zus Coffee will likely be cleared by the league if the Farm Fresh trio's contracts have indeed expired.
"If the contracts with their former team have expired, these [transfers] should be okay," Palou told SPIN.ph.
Sources said the league is looking into the contracts of the three players.
Will this be the last transactions involving sister teams?
Until such rules are laid down, this might not be the last transfer or trade that we’ll see unfold in the PVL’s sister-team saga.
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