*This content was translated by AI.
The East Asian Super League (EASL) announced on the 26th that it will newly name the 2025-2026 postseason "EASL Finals" and will be held in Macau's special administrative district from March 18 to 22, 2026.
The EASL Finals is the most extended postseason tournament in league history. After the regular season with 12 teams, the top six teams will advance to determine the champion of Asian club basketball. This competition marks the grand finale of the largest season since the launch of the EASL.
In the 2025-26 season, the EASL expanded the number of participating teams to 12 and set a new standard for the league by playing the regular season since October last year. Accordingly, $1.5 million (about 2.2 billion won) in prize money will be paid to the winning team of the Finals, $750,000 (about 1.1 billion won) to the runner-up team, and $350,000 (about 500 million won) to the third-place team. This is the largest prize in EASL history.
Starting this season, the postseason operation method has also been drastically reorganized. After the end of the regular season, a total of six teams, each of the top two teams in Group A, B, and C, will advance to the EASL Finals, of which two teams with the best performance among the top teams in the group will go straight to the semifinals. The remaining 1st-ranked team in the group and 3 second-ranked teams in each group will face off in the round of 6 to determine the team that advanced to the semifinals.
This season, the winner and runner-up teams of the KBL 2024-2025 season will participate side by side, and Korean basketball fans are also interested. Changwon LG Sakers was assigned to Group C, and Seoul SK Knights were assigned to Group A.
Here, Changwon LG recorded 1 win and 5 losses in Group C, confirming its failure to advance to the EASL Finals 2026. On the other hand, Seoul SK currently maintains its possibility of advancing to the postseason with 3 wins and 2 losses in Group A. SK is set to play its final regular season match against the Taipei Fubon Braves on the 28th, and if it wins this game, it will confirm its advance to the EASL Finals 2026 on its own. If they lose, they have to comprehensively consider detailed conditions such as gains and losses along with the results of other games in the same group.
EASL Finals games are scheduled for March 18, March 20, and March 22. On March 18, two semi-final matches will be held, and the venue of the match will be revealed later. After that, the tournament will continue to the semifinals on March 20 in Studio City, Macau, and will end with the EASL championship match and the third-place match on March 22.
The final match is based on the group stage performance and FIBA classification criteria. The No. 1 team in the group allocated to the round of 6 will be eligible for the home team, and the top team will be designated as the home team in the FIBA classification criteria according to the group stage performance. It is also designed to avoid early confrontations between teams in the same group, and the top-ranked team in the group will be placed in the same bracket as the relatively low-seeded team among the two teams that went straight to the semifinals.
The two teams that passed the semifinals will compete with the two teams that went straight to the semifinals to advance to the final, while the winning teams of the semifinals will play the championship game and the losing teams will play the third and fourth places. The championship match will be a single-round match with $1.5 million in prize money.
The EASL regular season will conclude with a triple header game on February 11, and the EASL Finals 2026 match will be finalized. Tickets for the EASL Finals 2026 will go on sale from February 21, with ticket-related details to be revealed later.
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*This content was translated by AI.
