Travel tales, life updates and some good ol' NBA Numbers Game action

Quite a combination of topics even for the Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza

BUCHAREST, Romania — The dateline is real.

Incredibly surreal for yours truly, too.

For the first time in my life, I landed Tuesday evening in Romania. This is just a way-too-short stopover on an incredible basketball experience that I am soon to partake in, but I knew from the jump that the trip to come later this week (more when/where/why details, once again, are forthcoming) would put me as close as I've ever been in sheer distance terms to my parents' birthplace.

Pretty much my entire family that preceded me and which I've actually met, on both my Mom's and Dad's sides, was born in Romania. So I had to arrange a detour here for the smallest of sample sizes from their original homeland … something I have longed to see for decades. My father and I spoke often of a Bucharest trek together someday; he never made it back once after an opportunity to leave Communist Romania in the early 1960s emerged after he completing his college studies. Yet we sadly couldn't figure out how to make the trip happen before his passing in June 2014.

I'll be headed to the Balkans next and that will be another incredible (and emotional) experience of great personal significance. In last week's Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza, I discussed the 35-year anniversary of my first-ever NBA article in a real newspaper, when I wrote about a young Serbian center named Vlade Divac who was leaving Partizan Belgrade to join the Los Angeles Lakers.

More than three decades later, after writing about Divac and so many more great players who made it all the way to the NBA from that part of the world, I am finally going to see a little of it with my own eyes.

CAN. NOT. WAIT.

I've always said that, if I won the lottery someday, my frivolous plans —beyond securing my family's future, property purchases, that kind of serious life stuff — would be traveling all over the world to watch basketball, soccer and tennis in all the exotic places I've been reading and writing about since my teen years but have never had the fortune to visit. Can you imagine, for example, spending a week or two in Belgrade and just going to a load of games in multiple sports and seeing some of the most raucous arena atmospheres known to the world?

Sports heaven.

I expect to get a small taste of that world later this week and, even though I've barely done anything noteworthy yet after a quick Monday in Londres and its spectacular temperatures in the 60s to tip off the journey, I already know it's going to be epic.

Alas, me being me, I didn't get a single decent picture of my surroundings before sundown Tuesday, so the Travelogue submissions will not really begin with this newsletter. I guess all I can do for now is share a few screencaps from the newsy tweets I fired off from the hotel lobby Tuesday night after the staff very kindly arranged a cup of cafea turcească for me:

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As a reminder: Tuesday editions, on this and every Newsletter Tuesday, go out free to anyone who signs up, just as my Tuesday pieces did in their New York Times incarnation.

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Audio Announcement

Something else I mentioned recently: How there would be at least one fun new audio project that I'll be contributing to in the new season.

Who knows if there ends being more than one in the end, but the announcement on the sure thing dropped Monday: My fellow Substacker Joe Pompliano wrote an extensive piece on how the ALLCITY Network is thriving — and expanding to Dallas — after highly successful forays into Phoenix, Chicago and Philadelphia since launching in Denver. I will be a Tim Legler-style contributor to an absolutely star-studded DLLS squad (in numerous sports) that is soon to be revealed; I'm guessing you caught at least a glimpse last season of how Legler teamed up with Denver-based Adam Mares for four tremendous weekly podcast episodes covering the league at large.

Throughout last season, as the Mavericks were making a Cinderella run to the NBA Finals, I had it in my head that I really should carve out the time to be part of some sort of exclusively Mavericks pod in addition to all my writing here and my national podding with Chris Haynes and my Insider contributions to networks like Sportsnet in Canada, NBC Sports Bay Area and the BBC in England. Hyperlocal sports pods are in increasingly high demand and, as a Dallas resident who sees so much of the Mavericks, it made little sense to me to not try to create some Mavs-specific audio content.

But here's the thing: I’m not that kind of creator because I have no technical ability to do any pod-launching on my own. I can't edit video. I can barely record passable video. I'm a words guy. So I was so thrilled to hear that ALLCITY, without warning, was coming to Dallas. They are building a wonderful new studio that will host five separate pods a week dedicated to the Mavericks, Cowboys, Rangers and Stars ... plus more pods on other local colleges and teams. It's going to be tremendous. I will be joining an accomplished cast on several Mavericks shows every week ... and now all I have to do is report, analyze, pontificate, etc. All I have to do is the role I was made for: Just talking.

Yet just to be absolutely clear: Joining the DLLS project (now this sounds like a Fabrizio Romano tweet) will have zero impact on this Substack. I will continue to write here four times (or more) per week and, no matter what other contributor roles I take on elsewhere, this remains home for all my writing and all my newsbreaking. I believe it is important to diversify in modern media as much as the gas tank allows, but my general philosophy is to team up with other entities on the stuff that I can't do well by myself on my Substack. I couldn't come close to assembling quality video essays on the NBA without the assistance of Bally Sports Southwest and my dear friends Clark Rowe and Tanner Rottman over the past few seasons. I can't make a podcasts look and sound as professional and pretty as ALLCITY is going to make these DLLS Mavericks shows look. I can't replicate the charge and buzz that comes with doing live radio in an actual studio like I enjoyed for much of last season when Scott Prusha and my pals at Panini Trading Cards and Collectibles made The Saturday Stein Line happen weekly on 97.1 FM in Dallas … until the station changed formats and went completely away from sports talk.

That is what led to me to this DLLS collaboration. The shows will be starting very soon to make it even clearer.

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Public Service Announcement

Please don't forget the request I lodged Monday.

I am (fingers crossed) hoping for 100 readers of this newsletter to share their predicted 1-to-15 ladder for the Eastern Conference for the coming season.

How do you expect the conference standings to look when the regular season ends?

You can register your predictions in permanent ink in the story link embedded in this sentence.

The goal is to get at least 100 responses by next Monday so our trusty tabulator Deven P. can help me assemble an official community predicted finish for the East for the coming season. Then next week we'll do the same with the West.

I thought this would be a fun exercise to give everyone some ownership of what The Stein Line foresees for the NBA's 79th season. Please help me spread the file around to friends you think would enjoy participating so we can get to triple digits.

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Numbers Game

🏀 1

The Warriors' Steve Kerr is the only person on the planet to have won both an NBA championship and a top-level FIBA championship as both a player and a coach. Kerr won five NBA rings as a player in Chicago (1996, 1997 and 1998) and San Antonio (1999 and 2003) and was part of the United States' FIBA World Cup-winning team in 1986. As a coach he has won four championships with Golden State (2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022) and now an Olympic gold medal with USA Basketball.  

🏀 2

Olympic bronze medalist Serbia held firm at No. 2 in the latest FIBA world rankings behind the No. 1-ranked Americans, with silver medalist France rising from No. 9 to No. 4. The top 20:

🏀 7

The United States has won the gold medal in five successive Olympics and lost only one game in the process for a record of 35-1 ... but the Americans have also won gold in just two of the last seven FIBA World Cups (2010 and 2014). They have likewise finished sixth (2002), seventh (2019) and fourth (2023) in that competition. The 2027 World Cup is in Qatar.

🏀 40.2

Before his Olympic struggles, Denver's Jamal Murray shot just 40.2% from the field in the playoffs for the Nuggets, who lost in seven games in the second round to Minnesota as the league's defending champions.

🏀 1

Trivia Question: Only one team in the NBA's existing 30-team configuration has never played on Christmas. Can you name it?

🏀 2016

The Spurs have been scheduled to play on Christmas for the first time since 2016 when they visit the Knicks at Madison Square Garden in the first of five NBA games televised on Dec. 25. In the second game on the five-game slate, as we've been reporting for some time now, Anthony Edwards-led Minnesota will make its first Christmas Day appearance since 2017 when it visits Dallas. 

🏀 7

Milwaukee played on Christmas for seven consecutive seasons before failing to crack the Dec. 25 schedule in 2024.

🏀 1,200

Last week's schedule release made 1,200 of next season's 1,230 regular-season games official. The remaining 30 will be finalized by the league office in December after the NBA Cup field is whittled down from 30 teams to eight.

🏀 40

Excellent schedule note from Spurs broadcaster Dan Weiss: There are 40 two-game "baseball series" on the NBA's 2024-25 schedule in which one team hosts the same opponent in the same venue for two consecutive games ... just like in 2023-24. Road teams went 42-38 in that scenario last season, validating my long-held belief that the two-game sets are a disadvantage for the home team.

🏀 .542

The overall numbers across the three seasons that the NBA has employed the baseball series concept aren't as one-sided: Home teams, as Weiss notes, are 219-185 overall for a .542 winning percentage. The breakdown is 66 two-game sweeps for home teams, 49 sweeps for away teams and 87 splits.

🏀 3

The NBA has scheduled three regular-season games abroad next season: Miami and Washington play Nov. 2 in Mexico City and San Antonio plays both of its 2024-25 games against Indiana of the Eastern Conference in Paris on Jan. 23 and Jan. 25 to showcase French phenom Victor Wembanyama.

🏀 704

Trivia Answer: It's the Charlotte Hornets from the 704 area code.

🏀 3

I have three free one-month subscriptions to hand out to the wonderful new newsletter curated by my pal

Iztok Franko

. The first three people who register interest in my Substack Chat (look for the appropriate thread) will win them!