Even on this Cavaliers at Celtics Tuesday ... shouldn't we be looking harder at the struggling 76ers?

This Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza also features a moving guest tribute piece from Orlando's Bill Pope in the wake of the recent deaths of two beloved NBA scouts: Brent Haskins and Brendan Brown

Maybe the team we really should be talking about on this Newsletter Tuesday is Philadelphia.

The 76ers, after signing the only All-Star to switch teams in free agency during the offseason, are 2-11 after Monday night's loss to Miami.

Tyrese Maxey has played in only seven of those 13 games. Paul George has only played in seven after leaving Clipperland for Philly. And Joel Embiid, looking nothing like the Joel Embiid who averaged more than a point a minute last season before he got hurt, has played in only three games.

As a trio, of course, they have yet to appear in a single game together.

All the injuries, though, won't stop the alarm bells from ringing. The Sixers held an hour-long team meeting after the loss to the Jimmy Butler-led Heat, presumably because they already understand the daunting reality laid out in this tweet from The Athletic's Mike Vorkunov:

Today's big story, mind you, is naturally/obviously/unavoidably Cleveland at Boston. The Cavaliers can become just the second 16-0 team in NBA history with a road win. The Celtics are the defending champions. 

I already covered in Monday's This Week In Basketball assemblage how lucky the league is that this is also an NBA Cup game that, thanks to Cleveland's ridiculously perfect start to the season, appears to carry greater historical significance than any NBA Cup group play game to this point. 

Which makes us wonder ...

Regular readers know by now where I stand on the NBA (Not A) Cup and a format that turns 60 regular-season games into 60 group play results by counting game scores twice. Enough, though, about what I think. 

I want to hear where you stand. 

Are you good with the NBA Cup's current format (despite all my complaining)? 

Or do you think it would be better — as I believe is the minimum standard if we're going to call this thing a tournament — to take the whole league to Las Vegas for one week (and change), put 28 of the 30 teams in a hat (with first-round byes for the two teams that reached the NBA Finals), draw them out randomly and play out a true single-elimination event until we have a true Cup champion?

Let me know in today's poll:

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Touching Tribute

The recent deaths of Brent Haskins and Brendan Brown have rocked the NBA ... especially within the NBA scouting community in which both worked.

Advance scouts have historically done some of the hardest work in the league, traveling from city to city — separate from their teams — to study future opponents and file frequent reports to their coaching staffs to prepare them for upcoming games. There are no home games for advance scouts … on a schedule likely to stretch twice as long as the 82 games their teams contest.

Orlando Magic personnel scout Bill Pope, who previously worked as an advance scout in Detroit and Sacramento for many years, was moved to write the following piece after Haskins' death and asked me to run his tribute to Brent, Brendan and other colleagues lost in recent years. The Stein Line is honored to do so:

"Travel safe."

When I first began working as an advance (never advanced) scout in the NBA nearly 20 years ago, every time I would leave the arena, other scouts would say "travel safe" or "be safe" as we left. I always thought it was a bit odd. I was 40 years old and had coached in college 15 years and that phrase never entered my vocabulary. It might be "goodbye," "see you down the road" or "good luck" ... but more often than not you just left the gym and knew you would see them somewhere else. But being brought up in the game at Kansas around Larry Brown, one of the greatest coaches and most superstitious people I've ever encountered, I started thinking about it and said to myself: "I better say it back, because what if I don’t? What might happen?" So it became my refrain, too, every time I left the arena.

On Friday night, I heard the news that Brent Haskins passed away. Brent worked as an advance scout for most of the time I was in the same role and he continued in that role until he passed, most recently working for the Pistons. And like for many in our small advance scouting community, news of Brent's passing at age 51 hit me hard. He is not old enough to be gone. He was such a good soul. Each time you saw him on the road he had a story to tell and a wonderful laugh that followed. He was in basketball his whole life. His father Clem was a great player and coach. Brent was so happy in recent years when he found someone he loved and married and enjoyed the new family that he gained through marriage. There will be a lot of sadness in his family now ... and also in our scouting family. 

As I approach my 60th birthday I understand that the cycle of life means that we will lose people around us. Normally our parents will go before us, their friends and others near us, but when our contemporaries or peers begin to die, it really makes you take inventory. And way too many young people in the scouting field have left us in recent years.

Advance scouting is a hard job. It was particularly difficult in the early 2000s when I began doing it. The lifestyle and routine of the job is challenging in itself. You get up early in the morning to take the first flight to a new city; first flights are necessary in case anything goes wrong (as it often does in travel) to ensure you don't miss the game assigned. Some scouts sleep on the plane but most work because you have to. There is always more work than there are hours in the day. Watching film on your next team, reviewing past reports and making calls ... all part of it. You check into a hotel — usually a Marriott because its rewards program facilitates travel with your family in the offseason — and you get to the arena early to watch warmups and prepare for the game. During the game you write down every play call you can identify, draw diagrams and collect personnel notes. After the game you have to make sure to finish your report and send it to your coaching staff — before you go to bed — because they are expecting it the next morning when they get to the office.

This normally keeps advance scouts up until 1 or 2 in the morning, followed by an early wake-up call to travel to the next city.

And then over and over this pattern repeats itself for eight months.

The job has changed over the past 20 years. Technology has made it easier. In my early days there was no immediate access to game film. The scouts that did our job had to be great; they had to be able to accurately register times and play calls during the game but also diagram plays correctly during live action. Waiting until after the game to review video was not an option. Many teams nowadays just ask for play calls and times and rely on others in the office to do the time-consuming work from the office. This started with the Spurs and some offshoots from the Gregg Popovich coaching tree.

There have been times when veterans like me wondered if our job would be made obsolete thanks to analytics staffs and organizations that downplayed the need for traditional advance scouting. But even today there are still some teams out there that appreciate and value what information an advance scout can add to the puzzle. They still write reports. They still diagram plays. And they are still gone from their families for hundreds of days a year, on little sleep, trying to provide an edge that may help their team win games.

Advance scouts are always in crowds — in airports, airplanes and at games — but also always alone.

The job got even harder as teams gradually began moving scouts further away from prime seating positions to be able to hear play calls. The league mandates that an advance scout from the next opponent of each home team gets a good seat on the lower level, but even that is up to each team's interpretation of "good seat" in the modern game, with excuses made all the time for declining vantage point quality. It's always economically driven, because seats closest to the court obviously generate the highest revenue, but two seats at the scorer's table should be a league mandate.

Diminishing seat quality did, however, bring scouts even closer together and made us reliant on one another. The competitive aspect began to fade and collaboration became increasingly important. As an example: If my team is the next opponent for Miami, I would be allocated a prime seat down low in Miami. Then it's then up to me to hear play calls and properly interpret verbal calls or visual signals that are challenging to record no matter where you're sitting when it's a fast-paced game. If my team is the second- or third-next opponent for the home team, chances are I would be allocated a much higher seat. That makes you reliant on the scout on press row to do a great job gathering information and then be willing to share play calls and more with the scouts sitting farther away. So we had to rely on one another more and helped one another more. And that gradually made us care about each more than we had before.

The joke amongst advance scouts is that you hear the same three questions at every game you attend:

1. What team you doing tonight?

2. Where you coming from?

3. Where you headed next?

And then the bonus question: How is your family?

They became routine questions, but in the short time each game that scouts spend socializing together, it meant that over the course of the season you began to learn about everyone's personal lives. A real camaraderie develops ... and then you begin to lose some of those friends.

Some 15 years ago we lost Clippers scout Jerry Holloway. Jerry was a big personality who lived in Philly and, any time he knew you were coming to town, he would volunteer to give you a ride to the game (this, kids, was before Uber existed). He knew every reporter and sideline reporter and they all looked forward to his presence and jokes. Jerry had a young daughter, Reese, that he loved so much and talked about all the time. When he passed, various scouts and his close friend Mike Dunleavy (head coach of the Clippers at the time), pooled resources to start a scholarship fund for Reese.

More recently we lost Greg Ballard, who was a great player at Oregon and a champion in the NBA with Washington who then held several jobs in the league — including advance scout. He was a big man with an even larger presence and a loud, hearty laugh. Everyone loved being around Greg. I still have the voicemail from him a few days before his death when he knew he was dying and wanted to check on me and let me know he was doing great. We made GB42 pins that the scouts shared; I keep one in my backpack to this day.

Two years ago Tom Barrise left us very quickly. He survived only a short time after being diagnosed with cancer. A Jersey guy through and through, Tom was a coach at every level and even had a two-game stint as interim head coach of the Nets. But his last job was advance scout and he loved being in the gym. It's what he did. He loved his son Taylor and bragged on him every time I saw him. He was such a proud grandfather, too.

Earlier this month we shockingly lost Brendan Brown. It was so stunning because I had just talked to him for an hour the week prior and he made no mention of any health issues. He was mostly telling me about his daughter Sydney and what a great performer she was and, of course, telling me about all things Knicks. A basketball lifer, Brendan grew up in the game just like Brent Haskins. Brendan got into coaching to follow his dad Hubie and worked as a scout, as an announcer ...  anything that kept him near the game.

I am also still reeling from the loss of the Bucks' Ron Stewart two years ago. Stewie was a personnel scout when he passed away, but he traveled in our circles. He was going to check in at a rental car counter and died of a heart attack. Such a shock. He died just a few weeks after seeing his son get married in Palm Springs. Such a nice guy that seldom had a cross word to say about anyone and always dressed so sharply. Stewie had coached in college on both the men's and women's side and was always around the game. Having dinner with him the week before his son's wedding after a KU practice ... I think about that meal often.

I know it's a sign I’m getting older that my friends are beginning to pass away, but it shouldn't happen to people at our young age. It should happen when we are in nursing homes, retired and far away from basketball, when our kids are grown up and have their own families. We are losing so many truly good ones like Brent Haskins. Scouts with big personalities and big hearts that we look forward to seeing — scouts that enrich our lives for those few hours we spend together at a game.

It makes me contemplative and introspective as I think about them and little things constantly remind me they are gone. And now I understand better why we say "travel safe" when we part.

Travel safely, fellas. We miss you dearly.

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Numbers Game

🏀 20

This NBA Cup Tuesday also somehow marks 20 years to the day since The Malice at The Palace (which I have always stubbornly referred to as The Malice of Auburn Hills). Can't believe it's been two decades and, when you watch the footage, it's still hard to believe what happened that night.

🏀 18-37

The Eastern Conference is 18-37 this season (.327) in head-to-head matchups against Western Conference teams after East teams went 3-0 on Monday night.

🏀 51

The Celtics continue to lead the NBA by attempting 51.1 3-point shots per game.

🏀 7

Seven teams are averaging at least 40 3-point attempts per game this season, plus three more in the 39s. Boston was alone in that category last season at 42.0 per game.

🏀 12,011

San Antonio's Chris Paul, now up to 12,011 career assists, is the third player in league history to surpass 12,000 dimes. The only other two: John Stockton (15,806) and Jason Kidd (12,091).

🏀 3

Three of the four teams that reached the NBA Cup semifinals last season wound up making coaching changes: Milwaukee (Adrian Griffin to Doc Rivers), Phoenix (Frank Vogel to Mike Budenholzer) and the Lakers (Darvin Ham to JJ Redick).

🏀 60

Great catch by loyal reader Alejandro Proskauer when he read last week's Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza. I wrote about the 60 regular-season games that are treated as tournament games, too, by counting the game results twice, but as Alejandro noted: It's actually 66 of 67 NBA Cup games which are regular-season games that count twice.

🏀 6

That total of 66 includes six games that have not yet been scheduled: The four quarterfinal matchups and, of course, both semifinal games in Las Vegas to follow. The Dec. 17 championship game is the only NBA Cup game separate from the regular-season schedule ... game No. 83 for the two teams that get that far.

🏀 98.5

What all that math means: 98.5% of NBA Cup games are regular-season games that count twice ... even higher than the 89.6% figure I included in last Tuesday's column. 🤦‍♂️

🏀 $514,971

A more precise figure than last week's: Players on the team that wins the NBA Cup earn $514,971 each. Players on the second-place team earn $205,988 each, with players on the two teams that lose in the semifinals earning $102,994 each and players whose teams lose in the quarterfinals collecting $51,497 each.

🏀 34

Fun research from Hawks play-by-play voice Bob Rathbun: Atlanta's one-point win Monday at Sacramento came in the 327th game played between the franchises ... in 34 different arenas over the years. Bob brought this to my attention in part because he saw that one of those neutral-site games was held at my cherished Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo (even though it is one of the great regrets of my life that I sadly never actually made it to that glorious building in person).

🏀 7

I'm re-running this one because A) I thought it would get more traction last time and B) I am still astounded by the number when I think about it and what it tells us about the modern media landscape. Did You Know: There are seven different Mavericks postgame shows on the same night after a game in this era of YouTube-heavy podcasting? Seven! That includes the postgame show aired by Mavericks' official TV broadcast team, two local radio stations and four different podcast options for fans who find themselves needing more after the final buzzer ... including the show I contribute to four times weekly from DLLS Sports.