Simply put, Nick is my favorite Thunder of player all-time. I don’t know who my second favorite player is as of this moment in that I love role players and what they give to a team. Maybe if Andre could ever make a free throw…he’d become my second favorite Thunder player in the Thunder era.
From the first time I watched Nick play at Kansas it was obvious his father was a coach. The attitude, the toughness and the off the chart BBIQ made it clear his father had coached him. Roy Williams landed a champion when Nick decided to spend his college career in Lawrence.
Of course, as an OU fan, I hated when they beat us, but with Collison it was always about respect and admiration for the way in which he carried himself both on and off the court.
Nick Collison wasn’t a star. For his NBA career he averaged 6 points a game and 1.4 assists a game. He was a bear on the boards and a tenacious defender.
Yet having written this, Nick was the 12th player taken in the 2003 draft by the Seattle Sonics. All of Nick Collison’s fifteen years in the NBA were with the same franchise both in Seattle and in Oklahoma City. He never made an All-Star team or won an MVP award.
He was a master of the two man game with James Harden in both 2011 and 2012. With Harden and Collison on the floor together their offensive games meshed and it was a clinic in moving without the ball followed by the textbook backdoor pass.
He was also a master of drawing the charge and the image of a Memphis player crashing into the planted Collison is indelibly printed in every Thunder fan’s soul.
Collison was also the most interesting and accessible Thunder player in the press room. Talk to people at the Children’s Hospital in downtown Oklahoma City and you’ll hear some stories which had nothing to do with the hard wood, but everything to do with the nature of his heart as a human.
But most of all Collison was/is a class act and the model of what every NBA owner would want from one of his players on and off the court.
I still cry when I think about the Thunder beating the Spurs in Game 6 to advance to the NBA Finals. It’s something no real Thunder fan will ever forget.
Nick Collison is a part of all this which will never be forgotten and if you took a poll he’d be the most popular figure in the history of the Thunder franchise.
Nick Collison Night tonight inside the Peake will be a memorable experience for all involved. I doubt there will be a dry eye in the house.