Nemanja Bjelica prowled the halls of the Target Center with cold, calculated purpose. The memories of the arena’s layout were coming back to him with each new hallway that he walked down. “Thibodeau…I’m coming for you…Thibodeau…Мрзим те!!” he snarled under his breath, mixing the English that he spoke among teammates with the Serbian that he spoke among friends. Whenever an arena employee would try to stop him from going through a door or down an access-restricted corridor, he brushed them aside as if they weren’t even there, and there was such cold hatred reflected in his eyes that none dared to make an issue of it.
“Nemanja! Nemanja!” called a voice from behind him, the voice of a friend. The only voice that could, if even temporarily, interrupt his mission of vengeance. Nemanja turned around to see his teammate Bogdan Bogdanovic running towards him.
“What are you doing, man?” Bogdan asked in the mother tongue that they shared. “The bus is about to leave for the airport!”
“I have unfinished business here,” Nemanja said, gazing coldly at the familiar surroundings which he wished were not so familiar. The things that had happened here, he longed to quarantine into a part of his memory that would never again be accessed. “Many injustices took place in this cursed building.”
Bogdan appeared to be frightened by his friend’s hard, emotionless words. “That was in the past! Don’t you want to live for the future?”
“I would love to, Bogdan, but to live my current life to its fullest, I must purge the demons of my past life…” Nemanja answered before silently turning away from his teammate and continuing to walk down the hall. When Bogdan put a hand on his shoulder to stop his progress, he brushed it off and kept walking, and when Bogdan started calling his name again, pleading him to reconsider, the sound of those pleas didn’t even register in his ears.
—
“You couldn’t hide forever, Thibodeau!” Nemanja yelled, wrenching open the door which he knew to lead to the head coach’s office. However, when he saw an unfamiliar man sitting at the desk in the office, a feeling of confusion mixed with the righteous fury which had consumed his thoughts ever since he had stepped foot in the building. “Where is the man? Where is he? You are hiding him, I am sure of it! Tell me where you have hid Thibodeau!”
Timberwolves coach Ryan Saunders stood up to address the intruder. “Are you crazy? Tom Thibodeau hasn’t been coach here for a year.”
“DO NOT TELL LIES TO ME!” Nemanja bellowed, getting on his hands and knees to look under the furniture in the room. “YOU WILL TELL ME WHERE THE COWARD HIDES, SO THAT HE CAN RECEIVE PUNISHMENT TEN TIMES WHAT HE PUNISHED ME WITH!”
“He’s probably at home waiting for teams to call him with coaching offers,” Ryan said as Nemanja upended the furniture in his office with frustration. “Maybe you can find him there.”
Nemanja stopped his ransacking of the coach’s office when he heard these words. “Home…Thibodeau’s home…yes. The coward will be found there, and when he sees my dreadful approach, his trousers will be wet with urine released in utter fear of my vengeance…” In a trance, his vision filled with scenes of the torment which he would soon inflict on his former coach, Nemanja walked back down the hallways of the Target Center. “Thibodeau will pay…Thibodeau will suffer…Тхибодеау ће срести своју најгору ноћну мору, а то име је Немања Бјелица…”