East Asia Super League
East Asia Super League
Main page

East Asia Super League

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
East Asia Super League

The East Asia Super League (EASL) is an international basketball league featuring 12 club teams from Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan (Chinese Taipei).

From 2017 to 2019, four pre-season tournaments (the Super 8 and the Terrific 12) were organized by the EASL, featuring clubs from selected professional basketball leagues in the region.

With official backing from FIBA Asia, the EASL has made a transition towards a full-fledged league. The first such season commenced in 2023 and feature eight teams. This was expanded to ten teams for the 2024–25 season, and expanded to twelve teams for the 2025–26 season.

Since the 2025–26 season, the EASL serves as a pathway towards qualification for Basketball Champions League Asia, FIBA's continental club competition in Asia.

The East Asia Super League was co-founded by Matt Beyer and Henry Kerins as the Asia League as a response to what the founders deem as a lack of high-level international tournaments featuring basketball clubs in the region also taking into account the population in the region, about 2 billion, which could be a potential market for a regional inter-club tournament. The Asia League was envisioned to be East Asian counterpart of the NBA's Las Vegas Summer League where professional teams from Asia could compete against each other with minimal conflict with their mother league's schedules.

Their stated mission is to be able to organized basketball tournaments featuring club sides from top Asian leagues with the organizers naming the CBA (China), B.League (Japan), KBL (South Korea), PBA (Philippines), SBL (Taiwan), and the ABL (Southeast Asia, China, and Taiwan).

The first tournament by EASL, then called the Asia League, was the Super 8: Macau Basketball Invitational, involving eight teams in September 2017 at the Studio City Event Centre in Macau. The competing teams in attendance were the Zhejiang Guangsha Lions, Shenzhen Aviators (formerly Shenzhen Leopards), Goyang Orions, Seoul Samsung Thunders, Fubon Braves, Pauian Archiland, Chiba Jets, and Ryukyu Golden Kings.

Organizers initially dubbed the tournament as the "Asia League," but this led to a legal dispute with FIBA over the name of the league when FIBA deemed the tournament's branding and marketing to be in conflict with its own FIBA Asia Champions Cup. The dispute led to the renaming of the competition to "Super 8," and the tournament was then officially recognized by FIBA after the league organizers sought legal assistance of Quinn Emanuel's Thomas Werlen, who has represented FIFA in investigations of the United States Department of Justice.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.