Hanoi Buffaloes

The wait ran to nine seasons before the Hanoi Buffaloes finally lifted a Vietnam Basketball Association title in 2025, and they closed the gap in emphatic style: fourteen wins from fourteen in the regular season, a seventeen-game run without defeat, and a 3-0 sweep of the Nha Trang Dolphins in the final. Tamyrik Fields took the Finals MVP award, though the campaign carried the weight of two earlier near-misses — beaten 3-0 in the 2018 final by Can Tho Catfish and again, 3-0, by Saigon Heat in 2022.

Thien Minh Group set the club up in July 2016 as the first professional basketball side based in the Vietnamese capital, and the "Trâu Thủ Đô" nickname has stuck to a team playing in blue and orange ever since. Their fiercest fixture is against the Thang Long Warriors, a meeting billed locally as the Derby Thủ Đô; in 2023 alone the two sides traded a 93-91 Buffaloes win in June for a 95-90 defeat two months later that snapped a seven-game winning streak.

Between the two finals defeats and the eventual title, the Buffaloes kept reaching the semi-finals without breaking through — 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024 all ended there. It took the current head coach, Matt Van Pelt, to get them past that stage. Van Pelt once played for the club himself, back in 2017, before returning to the bench to guide the roster that finally won it.