Asian Games Korean basketball sweeps 4 medals, but challenges remain at home

Korean basketball is enjoying a rare moment of across-the-board success at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, securing medals in all four men’s and women’s 5x5 and 3x3 events, a striking international resurgence for a sport that has struggled for attention, infrastructure and stable pipeline at home.

The men’s 5x5 team, coached by Latvia’s Nikolajs Mazurs, ended a 12-year Asian Games title drought by defeating host Japan 67-57 in the final, Sunday. The men’s 3x3 squad followed Friday with Korea’s first Asian Games gold in the discipline, defeating Qatar 19-10.

Korea’s women’s 3x3 team also claimed its first Asian Games medal, beating Thailand 21-8 for bronze. The women’s 5x5 side, meanwhile, secured at least silver by defeating China 85-80 in the semifinals and advancing to Saturday night’s final against Japan.

For a sport whose domestic profile has long fallen from its 1990s peak, the results have offered an unusual burst of optimism.

“The men’s gold was the result of a challenge taken on by everyone — the players, the coaching staff and the federation,” basketball analyst and former professional player Kim Jin-yong told The Korea Times. “It was not the perfect lineup everyone had imagined, but they waited for each player to be ready and for the team to show what it could do.”

The success has arrived far from the heady era of Korean college basketball in the mid-1990s. The 1993-94 Basketball Festival transformed the sport when Yonsei University became the first college team to win the tournament, beating leading corporate teams. Stars including Seo Jang-hoon, Lee Sang-min, Woo Ji-won and Moon Kyung-eun, together with Yonsei’s rivalry with Korea University, drew intense youth fandom.

Basketball’s cultural reach was reinforced by the Korean popularity of Japanese manga series “Slam Dunk” and the 1994 television drama “The Last Match.” Games were difficult to attend, and basketball players filled the cover of magazines that sold out quickly.

That popularity faded after the professional league’s 1997 launch, as franchise relocations weakened local ties and the sport lost the college-versus-corporate-team narrative that had made the Basketball Festival compelling.

Korea’s domestic game is not without signs of recovery. The Korean Basketball League drew 811,185 spectators during the 2025-26 regular season, its first time above 800,000 in nine seasons, averaging 3,004 per game. Yet it remains far below the league’s record 1.2 million spectators in 2013-14.

Meanwhile, Korea has long relied on small elite school and university pipeline to produce professional and national-team talent with just 2,351 registered student-athletes. Neighboring Japan’s much larger basketball ecosystem offers 582,670 registered 5x5 players and 33,386 affiliated teams in 2025.

Kim said the Asian Games breakthrough represented a hard-won result of players, coaches and administrators beginning to embrace changes and move beyond its closed culture that has long constrained Korean basketball. The federation’s willingness to persist with Mazurs, Korea’s first foreign coach for the men’s team, for example, mattered after early criticism of his team’s results and training methods.

“Waiting is itself a level of maturity,” Kim said. “People often say, after one bad game, that someone should be fired. But when you wait, something can emerge.”

He said the 3x3 medal was also not accidental. Korea required players to compete on its domestic Korea Tour circuit to be eligible for the Asian Games team, then gave them exposure through international events including the Nations League and World Cup qualifying competitions.

“It was a project designed to win gold, not something that happened because the pieces just fell into place,” Kim said.

The women’s 5x5 team’s success, he added, reflects years of work on a motion offense that depends on timing, movement and collective familiarity — an approach difficult to install without sustained training time.

But the Asian Games medals do not erase structural weaknesses. Kim noted that the women’s team lack enough players to even run full 5x5 practices. Korea must also resist treating the Asian Games as an endpoint, he said, arguing that the stated goal of reaching the quarter finals at the 2032 Olympics demands deeper investment in international competition, player development and the domestic game.

“The work does not end with this,” Kim said. “The federation and the league need to improve the atmosphere at arenas so people can enjoy the national team will also want to follow the league and basketball itself.”