Yang Hansen's Buzzer-Beater Lifts China Past Lebanon in World Cup Qualifying
With 2.2 seconds left and the score tied, Portland Trail Blazers center Yang Hansen caught a pass under the rim and laid in the winner as China beat Lebanon 89-87 in a FIBA World Cup Asian qualifier in Zhuji on Monday — capping a night of hard fouls, a pre-game taunt, and a takeover of China's trending boards.
The finish arrived with 2.2 seconds on the clock and the score tied at 87. Guard Zhao Jiwei found Yang Hansen cutting to the rim, and the Portland Trail Blazers center gathered the pass and laid it in just before the final horn — a buzzer-beater that sealed an 89-87 win over Lebanon in the second round of Asian qualifying for the 2027 FIBA Basketball World Cup, played Monday night in Zhuji, Zhejiang province. It was China's first home victory of this stage, and it set off the loudest online celebration Chinese basketball has seen in some time.
The winner carried extra charge because of what was said before tip-off. Lebanon's naturalized import had taunted Yang before the game — "I'm an NBA player, and who are you?" — a line that became its own trending topic once Yang spent the evening outplaying his tormentor before beating him at the buzzer. The game itself was bruising: Baidu's coverage described stretches that turned into "a wrestling match," with Yang on the receiving end of repeated hard fouls that had fans complaining the opposing defense was trying to take him out.
Yang's final line justified the attention: 19 points, 9 rebounds and 3 assists, on 8-of-9 shooting, along with the decisive basket. Teammate Wang Junjie was asked about it afterward and replied that "Yang Hansen is NBA super high level," a phrase that trended in its own right. On Weibo, Yang posted nine photographs from the night alongside a line from a Qing-dynasty poem about bamboo — "still firm through countless grindings and blows, however the winds blow from east, west, south or north" — and the post was liked more than 3,700 times within hours.
The story did not stay on one platform. The buzzer-beater held half a dozen spots on Baidu's hot-search board through the evening, and a Zhihu thread dissecting the game accumulated more than 3.5 million "heat" — the traction of a national sports moment, not a fan-club one.
For an international reader, the night is a snapshot of where Chinese basketball stands. Yang, drafted by the Trail Blazers in 2025, is the program's centerpiece — a 2.16-meter (7-foot) center built in the old Chinese tradition of towering big men, but one who spent his rookie NBA season learning to survive against professional pace. Qualifier windows against regional opponents like Lebanon are exactly where that development gets tested, and Monday's win doubled as a progress report: the kid is not just surviving the shoving, he is finishing games.
The harder battles, as Yang called them in his sign-off to teammates, resume in the days ahead. The bamboo poem he quoted was written as a statement of endurance rather than triumph — a promise that the plant stays standing whatever the wind does. After Monday, his country's fans will settle for the part where the ball goes in at the horn.