Basketball is popular in Taiwan. My daughter tried to get tickets to the high school basketball semi finals, but they were out of tickets in 4 minutes. She got tickets for the finals, but they ran out of tickets in 3 minutes.
However, have you seen the empty stadium for the pro games? It looks like they get about thirty people per game, and that includes the players.
Pro baseball here has plenty of fans, and people pay for those games.
So, what is the explanation?
It’s boring and they’re not very good. High school is more interesting.
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I think the reasons may be the same as the volleyball leagues.
For volley the three main leagues are HVL (high school) UVL (university) and TVL (top one).
HVL and UVL tend to have the arenas full or nearly full, while TVL’s matches hover around 50% on average, with some cities/events having more viewers and some being a semi-barren wasteland.
Both for HVL and UVL, the amount of viewers is huge because each school and university has a huge active community supporting their sport teams. When, for example, the Neihu volleyball team has a match, they attract to the arena their relatives, friends and school mates. With the matches being in Taipei, that’s several hundreds people. A similar thing applies to UVL, when a Taipei University has a match in Taipei, they can gather a huge crowd just by virtue of families/friends/course mates, plus all the volleyball fans who want to attend a match.
TVL is a bit different, because while most teams tend to “hire” players from the same University, they don’t represent it so there’s a smaller crowd pull. Also, if a team with many players from Taipei Da goes to play a match in Taichung, it’s not like people who attend a University in Taichung will be interested in supporting them.
During the HVL and UVL finals the arena was completely full for each match, with 4/5 matches going on the whole day.
And in a similar way to basket, the high school/university volleyball leagues tend to be more competitive. There can be a few years during which a team has the lead, but then a great player or two show up at a different school/university and the balance changes. Songshan won two years ago, arrived second last year and third this year. Dongshan discovered a couple of incredibly talented players and they won even with their best player getting injured. In UVL the winning team has won the 5th championship in a row, but it was an extremely challenging final that they won after going down 0-2. Most matches are fairly balanced, at least in the final stages.
TVL has one team which is basically the national team, both for man and female (Taidien), and they steamroll the Championship basically ever year. While it’s cool to watch them playing, I can definitely see why people would be more interested in a tight high school game over the 38653th match that ends 3-0 in favor of the top team.
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