East Asia Super League (EASL), the champions league of East Asian basketball covering Greater China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, has deep Los Angeles roots, which the league is seeking to expand.
EASL has held four successful single-site tournaments featuring Asia’s best teams from the top men’s leagues, including the China CBA, Japan B.LEAGUE, Korea KBL, Philippine PBA and Taiwan P.LEAGUE+ and SBL.
Starting this October, EASL’s home-and-away format tips off, with eight teams playing internationally at the same time their respective domestic seasons are underway, with electrifying pan-regional battles happening every Wednesday night, leading to a dynamic Final Four taking place in one of Asia’s most exciting metropolises March 3 to 5, 2023 and rotating annually afterwards.
EASL expects to have 230 million viewers of its 28 premium match ups in Season One. In Season Three, which is Fall 2024, EASL will expand from eight to 16 teams. When EASL expands, there is the possibility the league will enter into new geographies.
“East Asia Super League’s mission is to be Asia’s premier basketball league, offering our fans local heroes starring in an excellently presented game experience for live audiences and broadcast in primetime, and our vision is to be a top three league in the world by fan base size and commercial revenue by 2025,” said EASL CEO Matt Beyer.
Los Angeles native and former UCLA standout Baron Davis and Lakers NBA Champion Metta World Peace are both investor ambassadors for the league.
“I see East Asia Super League as being a huge game changer,” said Davis. “When you’re bringing communities together, when you’re bringing countries together, when you’re bringing leagues together, when you’re bringing the best top tier talent together, then it’s a unified message and projection to the rest of the world.”
Davis continued, “that’s the most important thing – having the best competition. Having the best represent an entire side of the world.”
Former Lakers star Metta World Peace, who also was in a long-term deal with a Chinese shoe company during his NBA career, weighed in, “What excites me about the East Asia Super League is the media content they’re producing can go global and it gives the players more opportunity for exposure.”
EASL is committed to growing its majority Generation Z and younger Millennial fan base aggressively, while reaching new demographics with engaging short and long-form video content, and a comprehensive multi-lingual and multi-cultural social media strategy on international and domestic social platforms with content in Chinese, English Japanese and Korean.
On social channels, EASL content receives over three million video plays on a monthly basis, with fan engagement increasing 265%, reach growing 107% and video plays rocketing up 466% between September 2021 and March 2022 alone.
Los Angeles icon and NBA super agent Bill Duffy, who represents legends including Luka Doncic, Steve Nash and Yao Ming, said, “This is what the EASL is all about. Matching up the best of the best. This will spur on the next generation of Asian basketball stars.”
Los Angeles native, Pepperdine graduate and former Pepperdine men’s basketball team star, Brian Goorjian, who is now head coach of the Australian men’s national basketball team, the “Boomers,” which just won Asia’s first medal in men’s basketball during the Tokyo Olympics, and is Australia’s winningest professional coach in history, spent 10 years coaching in China’s CBA and winning 70% of games there. He has just taken the head coaching job at the Manila-based Bay Area Dragons basketball club.
Goorjian said, “This [East Asia Super League] is an international competition with the best teams competing on a regular basis. The support for the teams, the coaching, the TV package, the amount of kids playing, and the development programs have all gone through the roof in the last 10 years. The young kids coming into the leagues, as compared to what it was when I came here 10 years ago, is night and day.”
For more information about East Asia Super League, visit EASL.basketball and follow East Asia Super League on social media.
