The Powerade Tigers first participated in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) Draft as Coca-Cola Tigers, on January 13, 2002, months before their first PBA season. The Tigers bought the original franchise of the Pop Cola Panthers in 2002 after Pop-Cola disbanded after the 2001 season. Coca-Cola received the rights for all of the Pop-Cola's players and draftees.
The Powerade Tigers were a professional basketball team that played in the Philippine Basketball Association from 2002 to 2012. The franchise was owned by Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines, Inc. (CCBPI) when the company acquired Cosmos Bottling Corporation from RFM Corporation. From 2002 to 2010, the team played as the Coca-Cola Tigers. The franchise won two PBA championships.
The Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) is a men's professional basketball league in the Philippines composed of twelve company-branded franchised teams. Founded in 1975, it is the first professional basketball league in Asia and is the second oldest continuously professional basketball league existing in the world after the NBA, established before the "open era" of basketball in 1990 where FIBA allowed longstanding domestic leagues, which mostly had predated the PBA, to become professional. The league's regulations are a hybrid of rules from the NBA and FIBA.
The Pop Cola Panthers were a professional basketball team that played in the Philippine Basketball Association from 1990-2001. The franchise was owned by RFM Corporation. In 2001, when RFM Corporation sold its entire stake in Cosmos Bottling Corporation to Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines, Inc. (CCBPI), the PBA franchise was included in the transaction. Upon ownership by CCBPI, the PBA franchise renamed the Coca-Cola Tigers beginning the 2002 PBA season and was considered as an expansion team.
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Rafi Reavis became the team's first draft choice, the 2nd pick in the 2002 PBA Draft. Different with the former expansion teams, Coke immediately won the All-Filipino Championship during their first season.
Rafael Reavis is a Filipino-American professional basketball player for the Magnolia Hotshots of the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA).
An expansion team is a new team in a sports league, usually from a city that has not hosted a team in that league before, formed with the intention of satisfying the demand for a local team from a population in a new area. Sporting leagues also hope that the expansion of their competition will grow the popularity of the sport generally. The term is most commonly used in reference to the North American major professional sports leagues but is applied to sports leagues in other countries with a closed franchise system of league membership. The term comes from the expansion of the sport into new areas. That sometimes results in the payment of an expansion fee to the league by the new team and an expansion draft to populate the new roster.
In Coca-Cola/Powerade stint, they have never received a number-one pick.
