Jusuf Nurkic sat in the back row of the team plane. The mood was subdued; they had just lost, and his teammates knew that this game had meant a lot to him. Occasionally one of them would glance back to where he was sitting by himself, see his stony glare, and quickly snap back to whatever they were doing. That was fine by him; they should know some fear in their hearts, he thought. That was the problem with this team. Not enough fear.
Soon, even the occasional glances stopped, and soon after that, the lights in the cabin dimmed, plunging his world into darkness. A few light snores told him that most of his teammates were already asleep, but he had no desire to rest. He had matters to attend to.
He pulled out the iPad containing footage of the night’s game. He was not much for film study, normally, the game was played on the court, he figured, not on a computer screen. Looking around one more time to see that no one had snuck up on him, he navigated to the clip that he wanted. There was Nikola Jokic, backing into the paint, throwing up a pathetic hook, and here he came, blocking it out of bounds from the weakside. Jokic protests, claiming goaltending…
Nurkic snorted. Goaltending? Typical whiner attitude, he tought. He rewound and watched the play again. And again. And again… his eyes became focused on the repeating sound of the denial, of the shocked gasp from the Nuggets crowd, the crowd who wondered why their team would ever get rid of him in favor of a baby-looking weakling…
“Nurk?”
Nurkic felt a hand on his shoulder, and quickly put the device away. It was light now, somehow…
“You okay man? You’ve been watching that block for hours now. It was a good block, don’t get me wrong, but we were starting to worry.” Al-Farouq Aminu said, looking concerned.
“What? I’m fine. Don’t worrying about me. Worry about you from now on, okay?”
Aminu looked taken aback. “Okay, sure. Just, uh…” he smirked. “…clean up the mess you’ve made, alright?”