VBA at Nearly a Decade: Vietnamese Basketball Is Growing Fast, but Its Foundation Isn't

At the VBA, there is a paradox that the organisers know, the coaches know, but almost nobody wants to name out loud: the more professional it becomes, the bigger the crowds get, the fewer Vietnamese players there are who can actually decide a game. I remember my first evenings watching the league, when the stands still filled a corner of a small arena and people chanted local names. Now, when everything is measured in views and sponsorship packages, the chanting remains, only the name being chanted has changed. It is a shift you will not see if you only look at the box score. You have to sit long enough, across enough games, to hear that screech.

The VBA launched in 2026 with the ambition of turning basketball from a schoolyard, grassroots sport into an entertainment product that could sell tickets, go on television and attract sponsors. Nearly a decade later, that goal has largely been met. The league has a nationwide network of clubs, from Saigon Heat in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi Buffaloes in Hanoi to Danang Dragons, Cantho Catfish and Nha Trang Dolphins. Each team registers one Heritage Import, a player of Vietnamese descent raised abroad, and one pure Foreign Import. In theory, this is meant to raise the standard of play, to let local players compete, learn and grow beside better teammates.

Notably, the VBA does not exist in a vacuum. Saigon Heat once played in the ASEAN Basketball League, a regional stage where Vietnamese clubs faced squads built around high-quality imports. That experience was both a lesson and a shadow. It taught VBA teams that to compete regionally you need individuals who can make a difference. But it also convinced them that the only way to get stronger is to buy one more good import, rather than develop one more good local player.

That beautiful theory, after nearly a decade, needs to be tested against reality. And reality is always harsher than the sponsor's slide deck.

The trap lies here: when you let every team carry two import slots, you are not merely raising the quality of the league. You are reshaping how a team wants to win. Basketball is a sport where one talented individual can carry a whole group in the final minutes. So a team's probability of winning depends heavily on whether you have someone capable of holding the ball in the last seconds. The VBA, a short and high-intensity league, emphasises explosive individuals even more.

The result is a spiral I call "short-term optimisation eroding long-term depth": every team wants to win now, so it funnels the ball to imports; local players, especially ball handlers, gradually become screeners, spacers, receivers and passers-back.

Based on my experience following several VBA seasons, the share of scoring that comes from the two import slots on most teams is usually very high, in some games reaching half or more of a team's total points. This is not an accusation against any individual. The imports do exactly what they are paid to do. The problem is structural: if a team can win with two people, nobody has an incentive to develop a third or a fourth.

Look at how a VBA game unfolds. The first half is usually when teams run their sets, test line-ups, give local players the ball. But by the fourth quarter, especially the last five minutes, the ball almost automatically flows to the imports. This is not the decision of one particular coach. It is the logical consequence of a league where results come first, and where a good import slot can be the difference between winning and losing.

This creates a developmental paradox. Local players see the floor more than a decade ago, but the quality of their minutes is lower in terms of responsibility. They play when pressure is low, and sit when pressure is high. In elite sport, those high-pressure minutes are the real classroom.

Here we must separate two things often conflated: popularity and development. A league can be very popular without developing human resources. A sport can have big crowds and still be poor in talent. The VBA sits exactly at that dangerous intersection.

Economically, this is an attractive but tempting equation. A quality Heritage Import can immediately deliver a player of a clearly higher level, at a far lower cost than building an academy and waiting five to seven years for a harvest. For clubs with short capital, dependent on season-by-season sponsorship, the import route is the shortest path to results. But the shortest path, as always, is not the most durable. Vietnamese basketball is borrowing from the future to pay for the present.

The irony is that the imports themselves are caught in this spiral. They arrive, carry the team, shine, then leave when the season ends. They leave beautiful numbers on the stat sheet, but very few traces in the collective memory of fans. A mature sport is not built on guests, however excellent those guests may be.

Vietnamese football once walked this road. V.League clubs poured money into imports, and only when the import quotas were tightened did people realise, stunned, that the domestic midfield had been left empty for years. Vietnamese basketball is on a similar path, only it moves faster because the domestic base was already thin.

This is the biggest blind spot: we are measuring the development of Vietnamese basketball by the popularity of the league, not by the number of Vietnamese players good enough to compete at continental level.

People call me a spoiler. I am only listening to the screech of the wheel. And that screech, at the VBA, comes from the bench, where young local players sit watching imports handle the ball in the final minutes, season after season.

There is a sociological layer I want to state plainly. When sponsorship money flows into sport, it tends to flow toward stories that sell easily. Vietnamese basketball, with its young, dynamic, street image, is a perfect hook for brands chasing Gen Z. But that appeal easily turns the league into an advertising ritual rather than a sporting ecosystem. A sponsor does not need Vietnamese players to be better. They need a full house, a viral clip, a hashtag.

We do not lose audiences to ghost basketball, but to turning ritual into product. At the VBA, that ritual is being packaged very well, yet behind the glossy shell, the question of identity still hangs in the air.

The transfer market is the only place on earth where absurdity is celebrated as art. In a league where an import slot is the most precious asset, every negotiation revolves around buying an individual, not building a collective. Heritage figures such as Tam Dinh and Chris Dierker once became icons of the league, and that has its own value. But the icon of a league cannot replace the foundation of a sport.

If you ask a loyal VBA fan to name the three local players they loved most in the league's history, you will get more shrugs than you expect. That is not the fans' fault. It is the fault of a system that does not create enough characters for people to bond with.

The clearest consequence sits with the national team. At the SEA Games or Asian qualifiers, nationality and residency rules mean Heritage resources cannot replace a solid internal foundation. The people wearing Vietnam's shirt walk onto that stage, and the gap with Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia shows not so much in fitness or tactics as in naivety in decisive moments, exactly the skill the VBA should be training but is instead taking away.

And when the national team loses, the familiar reaction returns: blame the coach, blame a few individuals, blame a missed shot. But the roots lie deeper, at the system level, where every decision to allow one more import slot is one more postponement of the question of development.

Emile Durkheim spoke of "collective effervescence": when a crowd turns toward the same thing, it generates an energy that cannot be reduced to any individual. The VBA stands, on peak nights, have that energy. But collective energy only matters for development if it attaches to a team with an identity, with people fans can identify with. When the deciding faces change every season, when fans chant an import's name and that person leaves the following year, the energy dissipates. It does not accumulate into memory. And memory is what makes a sport.

A basketball culture does not die from losing. It kills itself when it thinks winning is everything. A league that only counts trophies without counting how many Vietnamese players grew out of it has trophies that are merely decorations in a trophy room.

Now, to the part where I might be wrong. My hypothesis, that the VBA is eroding its local core, has a significant hole. Perhaps a basketball nation needs an "import" phase to build a base, build an audience, build money, and only then have the resources to develop. Japan, South Korea and China did this with their basketball and football: before localising, they let imports lead the way. By that logic, the VBA's early reliance on imports is an investment, not a gamble.

I may also be misjudging the strength of the academies. Saigon Heat has an academy and a youth system; a few other clubs are building one. If today's sixteen- and eighteen-year-old local cohorts, far better trained than the previous generation, explode within three to five years, then everything I write today will look like premature pessimism.

But that is precisely why I write it, not because I am certain I am right. If the VBA wants to prove me wrong, it must prove it with something very concrete: the minutes local players play in decisive moments, and the number of local players who become genuine pillars of their teams. Not the number of games, not the number of spectators. But the number of Vietnamese players holding the ball with ten seconds on the clock.

I have staked my reputation on predictions that went against the crowd, and I know what it feels like to be pelted before the ball is thrown up. But this is not a prediction for a single game. This is a prediction for a decade. If the VBA creates an award for "most improved local player in clutch situations" and gives it the same standing as the best import award, I will be the first to tip my hat.

For now, let me sit back and keep listening to the screech of the wheel. Because if ten years from now the stands are still full and the scorers are still imported names, then we will have built a perfect arena for a sport that no longer has Vietnamese people at its centre.