Vietnamese Basketball: As the VBA Buys Imports to Win, Who Pays for the Next Generation?

A few seasons ago, I sat in a row of seats close to the court in a gymnasium in southern Vietnam. Beside me was a young coach who had just led an amateur team. Midway through the fourth quarter of a semifinal, he turned to me and asked: "Count for me — in the last five minutes, how many times did the ball pass through a Vietnamese player's hands?" I took out a sheet of paper and counted. Four times. Four touches in the final five minutes of a semifinal, in front of a nearly full arena. I do not tell that number to shock. I tell it because it is a trace of a question the whole of Vietnamese basketball can see but no one wants to name. People call me a troublemaker. I am only listening to the screech of the wheels. The VBA — Vietnam Basketball Association — was founded in 2026, marking the first time Vietnamese basketball had a professional competition, run as a summer league with teams based in major cities. Before that, Saigon Heat was founded in 2026 and became the first Vietnamese team to appear in the ASEAN Basketball League (ABL) from 2026, bringing domestic fans a standard of basketball far above the amateur level. In its first season, the VBA launched with five teams: Saigon Heat, Hanoi Buffaloes, Danang Dragons, Cantho Catfish and Hochiminh City Wings. In later seasons the league added Thang Long Warriors, Nha Trang Dolphins and a few others, while building a youth development system and semi-professional competitions behind it. The crux lies in the personnel mechanism. Each VBA team is allowed to register a limited number of import players and heritage (Viet kieu) players. In theory, this is how to raise the professional standard while the domestic talent pool is thin. In practice, these players take on almost the entire role of scoring, ball handling and creating breaks. A typical VBA game has a rhythm decided by the imports: they hold the ball most, shoot most, and when the game enters its decisive phase, the ball gravitates even more to their hands. A Vietnamese player growing up in that environment is taught a silent lesson: your job is to run the floor, to defend, to yield the stage. Here the data begins to speak. Based on statistics I have compiled across several seasons, the share of points coming from the group of imports and heritage players in the VBA usually hovers around sixty percent, reaching seventy in some games. In return, the minutes played by young domestic players — those aged twenty-two or under — in decisive games are often compressed to a small fraction of the regular season. In other words, the tighter the competition, the less Vietnamese players are used. This is the familiar paradox of any young league: the more a team wants to win to attract fans and sponsors, the more it depends on outsiders; and the more it depends on outsiders, the fewer chances for its own people. Set beside regional leagues, the picture is not uniquely Vietnamese. The ABL has seen Southeast Asian teams build rosters around naturalized and high-quality import players, while their domestic leagues still struggle to find a place for locals. But there is a difference in timing. Vietnamese basketball entered the professional era later than most countries in the region, meaning the window to shape an identity is still relatively wide — if the right choices are made. Once the habit of buying short-term success has set into the structure, fixing it costs far more than building it correctly from the start. I once wrote, in another piece, that the transfer market is the only place on earth where absurdity is celebrated as art. Vietnamese basketball has no hundred-million contracts yet, but it already has enough ingredients of the same disease: pricing an import by the points he can score in a few months, rather than by the value he leaves to the system. When the only measure is the scoreboard, people will always choose the fastest option. And the fastest option, almost every time, is not a twenty-year-old Vietnamese player. But this is where I must argue against myself. The most agreeable hypothesis — that imports are killing domestic basketball — may be wrong because it blames exactly one variable. If all imports were removed, the quality of the league would drop immediately, fans would leave, and revenue, already thin, would dry up. No money, no scholarships, no training courts, no full-time coaches for the youth — that is the slow death. The problem is not whether there are imports, but that teams use imports as a crutch to stand on, not as a teacher to learn from. The same import can both lift the team and mentor a young guard, or score thirty points while shutting down that guard's chances. The difference lies in the contract and the team culture, not in nationality. And I may be wrong on one more point. I am looking at Vietnamese basketball through the lens of someone who follows too many foreign professional leagues, where youth development systems are thick enough to carry the pressure of results. In Vietnam, that pressure falls on teams that have no real academies. Demanding that a VBA team be patient with a nineteen-year-old while sponsors only sign season-by-season deals is an unfair demand. If I criticize without looking at the revenue structure behind it, I am doing exactly what I keep warning others not to do: choosing what sounds good over what is right. So what is actually right? Perhaps timing. Esports taught football a lesson: a sixteen-year-old idol does not need to wait for anyone to retire. In young competitive disciplines like 3x3 basketball, the gap between a sixteen-year-old talent and a twenty-five-year-old professional is not as large as people think — if he gets to play. Vietnamese basketball holds an advantage football does not: the level of the league is still low, so the cost of giving young people a chance is correspondingly low. A roster spot for a young domestic player in the VBA is not an expensive gift; it is the cheapest investment any team can afford. I do not believe in moral appeals. I believe in well-designed rules. If the VBA wants a genuine generation of domestic players, it does not need to urge teams to give Vietnamese players a chance. It needs a mechanism that makes doing so the profitable choice: an import slot exchanged for minimum minutes for young domestic players, a bonus fund for talent-developing teams, a transparent statistics system to measure who is truly building and who is merely buying. Rules shape behavior faster than slogans, and more durably. My prediction for the next few seasons: if the VBA keeps its current mechanism, the gap between the champion and the rest will continue to be decided by import quality, and the national team will still lack players who have been asked to shoot in the most pressured moments — because they have never been asked to shoot in those moments at club level. But if the league dares to try an incentive mechanism for young domestic players, I am ready to admit I was wrong and write it again. Vietnamese basketball does not lack talent. It is only waiting for a rule brave enough to force people to believe that.