He is most angry when Doug McDermott accidentally knocks one of the room’s myriad prized mallards off its mount.

“Goddammit, McDermott!” Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau yells through a just-exhaled Pall Mall plume. “If I find so much as a dent in that duck you’ll be running stadium stairs until your brain shrivels into a raisin! I shot that with porcupine quills still in my face!”

It is the night before the team’s tilt against its hated rivals, the Indiana Pacers, the last home stand before a grueling seven-games-in-13-days road trip. The Bulls are gathered at their coach’s suburban Chicago quarters — a pea green split-level ranch built in 1971 and updated not a scratch since — for the first team dinner of the year.

“Sorry, coach,” McDermott mutters as he lifts the carcass by the head from the faded shag carpet. The body immediately detaches and falls to the floor. The Bulls rookie bends awkwardly to retrieve it.

“I hope you ate lunch, Douglas,” Thibodeau wheezes. “Because you’re not so much as looking at the Hamburger Helper I’m making.”

“Is it actual hamburger this time?” says Joakim Noah, in front of an early model Magnavox, half-watching his coach’s omnipresent VHS of In the Heat of the Night reruns. “I can’t do possum meat this time, man. I was shitting blood for…”

“No one can tell the difference, Jo,” Thibodeau responds. “I beat it a thousand times with the shovel. That’s how you tenderize it.”

Noah simply shakes his head and returns to the television, three permanent vertical glitches endlessly scaling down the screen.

The house, like the hotheaded Thibodeau himself, seems plucked from another era: paintings of ponds awash in fall foliage, checkered couches with pomade stains where his head rarely rests, and lamps with tasseled shades casting lukewarm light on alternating walls of floral-patterned wallpaper and wooden paneling. Newcomer Pau Gasol soon takes note of the fist-sized patches of duct tape peppered about the paneling.

“Coach,” he implores, cautiously. “Why the hands of anger?”

“Because strangling Nate Robinson would’ve been considered child abuse,” Thibodeau says, fingering the final nubbin of nicotine into an already smoldering High Life bottle. “I have to go microwave the beans.”