Most PBA fans deal with these constant amendments by referring to teams by the brand around which their names revolve. But some teams’ branding has been less consistent than Purefoods’s. In the ‘90s, the Pepsi Hotshots became the 7-Up Uncolas, and then reverted to the Pepsi Mega Bottlers. Abruptly, the team’s name switched to a different industry entirely, becoming the Mobiline Cellulars. Name changes can even hint at narratives of corporate acquisition: The Cellulars’ successor, the Mobiline Phone Pals, made way for the Talk ‘N Text Phone Pals, which became the Talk ‘N Text Tropang Texters, then the TNT Tropang Texters, and, most recently and more concisely, the Tropang TNT.

While the PBA has names that may sound bizarre, it is not some obscure league that’s allowed to goof off because few people are paying attention. In the Philippines, basketball is the major professional sport. The PBA season that started in 2013 was watched by nearly three-quarters of Filipinos, according to the estimate of one media consultancy.

"I think that basketball is way more important to ... most Filipinos than it is to average Americans,” says Rafe Bartholomew, a former editor at Grantland and the author of Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball. “There's a level of saturation of basketball in Philippine culture that just can't be matched here.” Bartholomew says that prowess in basketball translates to national prominence. “The current coach of the Rain or Shine Elasto Painters is a congressman from the province of Pampanga,” he notes.

What do fans think of team names in the PBA? Do they cringe, or at least chuckle, when an announcer introduces the Burger King Whoppers? Hardly: These are just the names of companies and products that pop up in everyday life. Bartholomew, who was introduced to the PBA when doing a Fulbright in the Philippines, says that he found the names to be distractingly amusing at first, but that they have come to seem normal enough. Still, he says, “It is funny, and one of the charms or quirks or idiosyncrasies of Philippine basketball that makes it fun to follow. There is a looseness, a willingness to just sort of go there."

Perhaps one of the reasons fans aren’t irritated by having to cheer for the latest processed-meat product is that the PBA has been completely commercialized from the very beginning. The league was established in 1975, and evolved from the Manila Industrial and Commercial Athletic Association (MICAA), an intra-company league that had been drawing crowds in its own right for years. A curious feature of MICAA, though, was that its teams were company teams, so players had to be listed on payrolls alongside salespeople and other employees, often with innocuous-sounding titles like “clerk.”