After eight consecutive days of basketball activities to start training camp, Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers gave his team some downtime after an early morning arrival in Milan on Saturday. From Celtics.com:

Their 9 p.m. local time tip off in Istanbul, Turkey, led to a late-night finish that pushed midnight. The team took a lengthy bus ride to the airport after speaking to the media and then headed out for the two-and-a-hal-hour flight to Milan, Italy, for the second leg of its journey.

By the time the Celtics landed in Milan, it was already 3:45 a.m. local time. It took another 45 minutes to get to the hotel, which meant players and coaches didn’t get into their rooms until about 5 a.m. at the earliest. And then they had to wait for their bags to arrive at their rooms in order to change out of the clothes they had worn on the flight.

It was a late night of travel, to say the least. It was so late that Doc Rivers put it in a very rare category.

“That was one of the later ones, yeah,” Rivers confessed when asked if it was one of the later nights of travel he had experienced in his tenure as Celtics coach. “We’ve had a couple like that. You usually have one a year.”

Players did shake the cobwebs enough in order to attend an NBA Cares event in the city. Boston is back on the court Sunday evening against Emporio Armani to wrap up their European adventure.