China Demolishes the Philippines by 44 Points in Asian Games Basketball Rematch
Three years after a one-point loss to the Philippines ended China's run at the Hangzhou Asian Games, a rebuilt Chinese men's team beat the defending champions 105-61 in Nagoya on Sunday — the group-stage statement of a tournament that now heads into the knockout rounds.
The final score was 105-61, and it was not that close. On Sunday in Nagoya, China's men's basketball team beat the Philippines by 44 points in the last group-stage match of the Asian Games, holding the defending champions to 61 while seven Chinese players finished in double figures. A post recapping the game counted the line: Wang Junjie 20 points, Liao Saning 14, Hu Mingxuan 13, with all nine players who took the court scoring.
For Chinese fans, the number that mattered was not 44. It was three — the years since a one-point semifinal loss to the Philippines at the Hangzhou Asian Games in 2023, on home court, that sent China out of a tournament it had expected to win. The Philippines went on to take the gold that year. Weibo filled on Sunday night with the word "revenge", and with the observation that this young squad — Wang Junjie dominating inside, Hu Mingxuan hitting from outside — had dismantled the same opponent that once broke the country's heart, as one recap put it, "settling the debt from Hangzhou."
The rout headlined an opening run of Chinese results at the Aichi-Nagoya Games, which open in earnest this week. The women's football team opened its campaign the same day with a 5-1 win over Hong Kong, a result that trended second on Baidu's board behind the basketball.
Not everything at the Games has gone smoothly. Before the first whistle, South Korea's basketball association vice-president Jeong Jae-young publicly branded the athletes' village housing "the worst ever" — leaking toilets, beds too short for his players, and some delegations moved onto a cruise ship. His complaints became a trending item on Baidu, the kind of organizational wobble that host Japan would rather not have advertised.
For China's team, the harder tests start now: the knockout rounds, where a group stage that has been a procession — three wins, none closer than 44 in the finale — finally offers opposition. But the group stage has already revised the story Chinese fans have carried since Hangzhou: a 44-point answer to a one-point wound.
