A real deal Tuesday night Cup game

It required a trip to a different country to watch a different sport ... but this is how it's done

LONDON — It was a tremendous Tuesday night for your Travelogue-ing correspondent.

I know you didn't ask but I couldn't resist sharing after relocating from Slovenia to England for a few days and making my way to a Cup game on this Tuesday evening before heading home.

A real Cup game for the record. Not the Tuesday night kind that is actually a regular-season game pretending to be part of a tournament.

This was a Carabao Cup game with a knockout winner and an eliminated loser and an actual upset that filled the Bermondsey air with true tension: Leyton Orient from the third tier of English football came to Millwall in a showdown of neighboring London clubs separated by a mere seven miles and shocked the home side from the second tier.

Millwall 0, Leyton Orient 1.

That's how the romance is so often generated in an actual Cup competition. A team from a lower division surprises a team of larger stature in one win-or-go-home game, sending their fans into delirium and causing the home team — which failed to register one meaningul attack in the 90-plus minutes — to be booed off the pitch.

OK, OK. Sermon over. I know my constant complaining about the NBA's Cup format isn't going to change much. I still think #thisleague can do much more to inject its NBA Cup with some variety, like letting Eastern and Western Conference teams mix from the beginning and finding a way to work a team or two into the field from the EuroLeague or some other top circuit that operates beyond American borders. Yet even I can concede that the hurdles faced by the NBA here are hardly insignificant with only 30 teams to choose from ... compared to the English Football League and its four divisions.

The truly important thing on this Newsletter Tuesday: I made my long-awaited first trip to The Den. It's the stadium that replaced the more storied Old Den starting with my first season on the NBA beat way back in 1993-94. For years this part of the world was regarded as perhaps the most dangerous place to visit on the UK football map and, even now when I expected zero trouble and saw nothing more distressing than a one-man pitch invasion in Tuesday's second half that led to some amusing Twitter footage, I still fielded "be careful" cracks from multiple friends once they heard where I was headed.

No chance, though, any of that would keep me away. Not when staying so close.

I also wanted to represent my dear friend Gordon Jago MBE, who is Dallas royalty, too, at age 91! Jago managed Millwall at the heart of the rough 1970s, so I've always been fascinated by the Lions' story. Additionally: Two US national team stalwarts I covered before becoming a full-time NBA writer — Kasey Keller and my pal Bruce Murray — played for Millwall in the early 1990s.

See? Had to go.

The announced attendance for the home team's shock defeat was 5,875 … including 1,560 Orient supporters who sang taunting songs all night to toast a win they surely never expected after three successive defeats to start their League One season.

Even with zero emotional investment in proceedings I really relished my place among them.

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Predictions Plea

Trusty tabulator Deven P. will let me know for sure, but I think we managed to secure the 100 respondents requested for our Eastern Conference predictions thread.

If not we came pretty close.

The Western Conference thread went live Monday. We're halfway to 100 there with much of the week still ahead of us. Please weigh in and help us reach 100 respondents.

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YouTube Corner

ALLCITY DLLS launched Monday and, as discussed here in the previous Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza, I will be contributing lots of Mavericks and NBA commentary to the network. Please allow me to share for starters ...

The impressive hype video:

And a link to our first two episodes ...

Monday:

Tuesday:

And my DLLS trading card (actually just a slide from the hype video):

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Numbers Game

🏀 22

LeBron James' upcoming 22nd NBA season positions him to tie Vince Carter for the league's longevity record.

🏀 282

The NBA has already established a start date for next season's NBA Finals. They begin 282 days from now on June 5, 2005.

🏀 4

Leave it to my pal Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press to do the research and determine that there are four nights this season when all 30 teams will play. The first is Nov. 4 and features a game starting every 15 minutes from 7 PM ET through 10:30 PM ET. The other dates are Feb. 11 and the last two days on the regular-season schedule: April 11 and April 13.

🏀 4

Separate from the Feb. 17-19 respite after All-Star Weekend in San Francisco from Feb. 14-16, there are also four days with no games at all per Reynolds' research. That includes Election Day on Nov. 5, Thanksgiving (Nov. 28), Christmas Eve (Dec. 24) and April 12. A fifth TBD day with no NBA games is expected in December once the NBA Cup knockout phase schedule is set.

🏀 3

This will be the third consecutive season with no games scheduled on Election Day to “continue to encourage fans and the broader NBA community to make a plan to vote and participate in the civic process."

🏀 7

There will be seven games played on Martin Luther King Jr. Day next Jan. 20. They are Dallas at Charlotte, Detroit at Houston, Minnesota at Memphis, Atlanta at New York, Phoenix at Cleveland, Boston at Golden State and Utah at New Orleans.

🏀 2

San Antonio will play two home games in nearby Austin next season, including a Feb. 20 date with Phoenix that will enable former Longhorns star Kevin Durant to return to the site of his lone season as a collegian.

🏀 30

Durant, as Reynolds notes, had 30 points in his final game in Austin as a Longhorn on Feb. 28, 2007.

🏀 8

The Clippers' move to the new Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif., makes possible something we haven't seen in the NBA since the 20th Century: Lakers and Clippers home games taking place simultaneously. Reynolds pinpointed eight such occasions next season: Jan. 11, Jan. 13, Jan. 15, Jan. 21, Feb. 6, Feb. 8, March 18 and April 4.

🏀 3

The NBA has scheduled three games for Feb. 9, which also happens to be Super Bowl Sunday. They are: Charlotte at Detroit (1 PM ET), Toronto at Houston (2 PM ET) and Philadelphia at Milwaukee (2 PM ET)

🏀 2017

As noted in this space recently, there has not been an NBA Finals rematch on Christmas since Golden State played host to Cleveland on Dec. 25, 2017. Before this stretch of seven consecutive season without one, five of the previous seven seasons did feature a Finals rematch.

🏀 2

Another interesting Reynolds find: There are two NBA games on April 7: Sacramento at Detroit and Philadelphia at Miami. That's the same day of the NCAA men's title game in San Antonio for college basketball supremacy, which has typically resulted in an off night for the NBA.