San Miguel Beer, Meralco to headline EASL season opener

The East Asia Super League (EASL) Home and Away launches its 2024-25 season, kicking off a thrilling double-header at the SM Mall of Asia Arena on Wednesday, October 2.

Two PBA basketball champions will banner the opening games with the reigning Commissioner’s Cup victors San Miguel Beermen will face Korean Basketball League finalist Suwon KT Sonicboom in the first game of the night, while PBA Philippine Cup winners Meralco Bolts will then take on Macau Black Bears.

The magnitude of how much the Philippine fans love the game of basketball propelled Albano and his company to conduct the EASL tip-off in the country, citing Manila as the best place to commence this year’s season opener. 

“Not only is it an honor, but really more of an obligation to grow the game here locally as well. So, once the chance came about scheduling the games here in Manila, the whole team, Adam included, we had a great deal of discussion, and we felt that Manila would be the best place to kick off the season.”

Heading into the second season, EASL has recently expanded in terms of number of teams. From previously having eight teams, they stretched the participating teams into 10. 

“We have added a team from Hong Kong and from Macau. So, we will be playing 34 games, starting with tomorrow, on the 2nd of October. The games will then go all the way through, all across about six months, and finish on the 9th of March,” said Vice President and Head of Commercial and Broadcast Operations, Adam Zecha.

“This will be 30 games during the group stage, four games during our playoffs, which is our final four. So, it is bigger. It is a bigger season than we had last season,” he added.

With EASL welcoming the expansion of participating teams within the neighboring countries, possibilities of inviting leagues from Australia and New Zealand entered the discourse as they are also playing in the FIBA Asia. 

Zecha explained that when there are champions of Asia playing each other, it attracts a lot of attention. It gets a lot of interest from different leagues around the region close by, as well as further away.

“We enjoy that, we like that, we welcome it. We want to be able to have the best teams playing across the world,” he said. “We need to work on the logistics on how we will make that happen. There are a lot of conversations going on about how to best structure something like that.”

Zecha even reckoned that they are not closing their doors to that opportunity in the future as they are always having conversations with other leagues about having more teams to join. 

In the previous edition, the Japanese team Chiba Jets won the championship with Philippine representatives, TNT Tropang Giga and Meralco Bolts failing to make it to the Final Four. 

No announcement yet on the location for the Final Four playoffs as the finishing season was held in Cebu last year.