Mike Collins was strolling down the hallway of his Las Vegas home when he spotted the strangest sight.

His son Zach was lounging in his room, staring intently at an iPad and scribbling in a notebook. Mike raised his eyebrow, surveyed the scene for a moment and then poked his head in.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just watching basketball,” Zach said.

“What are you writing down?” Mike replied.

Zach had been watching video clips of an NBA player — Tim Duncan or Dirk Nowitzki or Kelly Olynyk, Mike can’t recall which — and Zach was jotting down a series of notes about the players’ moves and countermoves and defensive tendencies, essentially crafting his own personal scouting report. He was 12 years old.

“Well,” Zach said to his father, pointing at the screen, “he likes to go right here and he likes to go left here. And on defense, he cuts the distance he has to go in half by running around the crowd like this.”

“I was like, ‘Um, ooooooo-kaaaay,’” Mike said. “I was stunned.”

Heading into this third NBA season, Zach Collins is poised to assume a prominent role on a veteran Portland Trail Blazers team with championship aspirations. But while he may be stepping into a starting job at power forward for the first time in his career, he’s been preparing for this moment for most of his life.

The Blazers traded for shot-blocking center Hassan Whiteside and versatile wing Kent Bazemore, added veterans Pau Gasol and Anthony Tolliver and signed playmaker Mario Hezonja during a busy offseason, bolstering a roster that reached the Western Conference finals last season. But the Blazers’ success might just hinge on the play of two young returning players — including the 21 year-old Collins — who are filling critical roles in the rotation.

“We added a lot of quality pieces, complementary pieces,” All-Star point guard Damian Lillard said. “But in my mind and my opinion, I think Zach and (Anfernee Simons), what they’re able to do this season, could really put us over the top.”

As Collins embraces a new role amid new expectations, he’ll have to lean on his old roots to guide him through the most important season of his career.

PREPARING FOR GREATNESS

There is a little friendly father-son debate about why — and to what extent — Collins started jotting down those old scouting reports.

Collins says his father suggested that he do it. Mike Collins disagrees vehemently. “Never in my life,” he said.

Mike Collins says he went on to discover a stack of four or five notebooks Zach had filled with scouting reports on all kinds of NBA players, ranging from Duncan and Nowitzki to Kevin Love and Kevin McHale. Collins says he remembers writing in one notebook. “He might be exaggerating that a little bit,” Collins said.

But no one disputes the effort Collins put into studying to be great.

He started watching videos in middle school, recording them off the television or visiting YouTube to scour old game footage. He loved watching bigs, of course, and patterned his game after Duncan and Nowitzki. But he would also watch guards like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, just to see how they led, how they fought for buckets and how they commanded the court. All the while, he’d take copious notes, documenting a player’s moves, strengths and even demeanors.

Collins admired Duncan’s combination of coolness and understated skill. He relished Love’s ability to finish inside among the trees and the way he positioned his body to corral rebounds. He marveled at McHale’s patience and assortment of offensive moves. And he loved everything about Nowitzki.

“He’s a killer,” Collins said of Nowitzki. “Just his mentality, his will to win. For me, watching him, no matter how many shots he missed, or how many turnovers he had, he just kept shooting and shooting and shooting. And eventually he put up numbers.”

Mike Collins was amazed that his middle-school-aged son was embracing his passion with such dedication. But even more, he was impressed at the level of detail he put into his passion. His notes were meticulous.

“He wouldn’t write, ‘Timmy,’” Mike Collins said. “He’d write ‘TD.’ And his breakdown was specific. ‘TD. Shoulder, shoulder, power dribble, baby hook.’ He was breaking down his moves.”

Collins was always advanced as a player, in part because Mike Collins — a 6-foot-8 athlete who played basketball at New Mexico State before a knee injury ended his career — started coaching him at 4 and continued all the way to high school, when he was an assistant at Bishop Gorman in Las Vegas. But Mike Collins was all brawn and guts as a player. Zach learned the UCLA offense when he was 9 and knew how to run a flex offense when he was 10. Collins surpassed his father’s skill level by the time reached 10th grade, Mike Collins says.

So while Collins oozes grit and toughness like his old man, he also features a deeper level of intelligence and grace. When Collins started taking notes of those old NBA videos, he was essentially starting to study for his career.

“He was already thinking at a different level at age 12,” Mike Collins said.

Mike Collins was thrilled to discover that Zach was studying Duncan and McHale and Nowitzki. But he was especially entertained by his notes on players like Jordan. Sometimes, after documenting a move in his notebook, Zach would jot down his own thoughts on how he might try to defend it.

“It was always interesting to see what he would say about Magic or Jordan,” Mike Collins said. “I remember one thing specifically on Jordan. He has that move, he dribbles into you, backs you up, then hits the fadeaway. Or, as soon as you would go after him expecting the fadeaway, he’d go around you. It was kind of a third deke. I remember Zach writing on one of them: ‘WHAT DO YOU DO?’ Like, you can’t do anything about that.”

Collins still watches old videos regularly and he often focuses on hotly contested playoff games or his favorite NBA Finals moments. He says Duncan and Nowtizki and Gasol — his new teammate — remain some of his favorite subjects, so he loves to watch the old playoff series between the Nowitzki-led Dallas Mavericks and Duncan-led San Antonio Spurs and the epic 2010 Finals between Gasol’s Lakers and the Boston Celtics.

“It’s just so fun to watch what those guys were able to do,” Collins said. “Back then, it was more of a balanced game. It was inside-out. It wasn’t just pick-and-rolls and pick-and-pops. They would throw it into the post and they ran the triangle offense, stuff like that. It was fun to watch. And I just like to take what those guys did that made them so successful. I like to watch them on the biggest stages, when the competition’s the hardest, because they’re the guy that the other team is literally trying to stop for a seven-game series. And they’re still able to get (stuff) done. It’s incredible to watch.”

But there’s another video Collins watches that he doesn’t find so incredible.

FINDING HIS ZEN

It was Jan. 11, 2019, and the Blazers were gathered in the theater room at the practice facility in Tualatin. They had defeated the Chicago Bulls by double digits the night before and coaches were reviewing game film with the team when the room erupted in laughter.

At the front of the room, blasted on the large movie screen, was video of the Blazers’ bench near the end of the game. Collins sat in the middle, blanketed by Moe Harkless and CJ McCollum. Collins was seething and inconsolable, his mind racing with rage after drawing a sixth foul and earning a late-game disqualification. Harkless rubbed Collins’ right shoulder and chuckled. McCollum lifted his hands in front of his body, pinched his pointer fingers and thumbs together, closed his eyes and started breathing deliberately.

Then McCollum offered a few words, which — if you read his lips — were discernible during the television broadcast.

“In through the nose,” McCollum said. “Out through the mouth. Breathe.”

Through it all, Collins just sat there stone-faced, towel draped around his shoulder, consumed with anger.

Since he surprisingly emerged as a rotation player during his rookie season, Collins has been a valuable piece on back-to-back playoff teams, averaging nearly 17 minutes in 143 games. But for all the enticing traits he’s revealed along the way — inside-out scoring ability, shot-blocking prowess, toughness — he’s also been plagued by inconsistency and overwhelmed by his emotions. Many a night he appeared on his way to a spectacular performance, only to become obsessed with a bad whistle or a missed shot or a busted defensive assignment. Even his superb games, like the 16-point, nine-rebound, four-assist night against the Bulls in January, could end with anger and negativity.

“I’m way too hard on myself and always have been,” Collins said. “I’m my own worst critic and I have a bad habit of getting down on myself. The last two years, I was killing myself, really, just mentally getting on myself and thinking about what happened three or four plays before instead of just moving on.”

Mike Collins admits his son inherited his temper, and it’s been hard over the years to watch him unravel. He would explode during youth basketball games. He would instigate fights in high school and have to be peeled away from opposing players. Occasionally, when he coached his son as a kid, Mike Collins would yank him from the game and threaten to bench him until the final buzzer.

“I’m coaching him and all of a sudden he’s angry and you see that your son can’t think,” Mike Collins said. “He just wants to scorch the planet. I would take him out, bench him. And then, there goes the lead, the other team is starting to score at will, and my assistant coach would say, ‘We’ve got to get him back in.’ I would be like, ‘You can put him in if you want, I’m not putting him in.’ It’s hard to watch when your kids are so hard on themselves.”

Over the summer, Collins decided that — to mature into the player he wants to be — he needs to find a way to harness his temper and redirect it into positive energy. So he’s trying to find his Zen.

He’s picked up yoga. He’s dabbled in meditation. He’s reading more, both for pleasure and inspiration, delving into topics ranging from mental health and leadership to casual novels. Right now, he’s thumbing through Tom Clancy’s debut bestseller “A Hunt for Red October.” But he’s also recently read David Goggins’ “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds” as a source of motivation. He hopes to reach a point where his fiery emotion doesn’t consume him and, instead, becomes a benefit on the court.

“My goal is to stay even-keeled,” he said. “If I can take care of that, it’ll help me in a lot of ways. It’s about channeling my (anger) into something good, into something that is going to help the team, instead of, inside, killing myself because I messed up. It’s really that simple. It’s something that I’ve kind of struggled with my whole life. I’ve come a long way, but I think this year I’m definitely going to take a big step to just forget whatever the hell just happened (on the court) and just keep going.”

READY TO TAKE NEXT STEP

If Collins can indeed find his Zen, he could be in for a breakout season. And the Blazers will need it.

They allowed Al-Farouq Aminu, who had started at forward the last four seasons, to leave as a free agent, opening up a spot for Collins. And with seemingly every other big man on the roster battling an ailment — Jusuf Nurkic is rehabilitating his gruesome left leg injury, Gasol remains sidelined while he recovers from May foot surgery and Whiteside has battled separate sprained ankles in training camp — Collins has been a steady presence.

He started four of five exhibition games and finished the preseason ranked third on the team in scoring (13.6 points per game), second in rebounding (7.6) and first in blocks (1.2), while shooting 51 percent from the field. It was especially encouraging considering he suffered a gnarly ankle injury during an offseason workout in July and was sidelined for more than two months.

“I like what he’s doing,” Lillard said of Collins. “He’s being really aggressive and assertive and I think that’s growth. In the past, he didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes or try too hard. To see him confident and aggressive, taking shots when he’s open, trying to score when he gets the ball on the block, playing aggressive defensively and being really vocal on the defensive end, you can tell he’s trying to step into being that guy at the four spot. And that’s what we’re going to need from him.”

When Collins was a rookie, his years of video study came full circle during a game against Dallas. After watching Nowitzki and jotting down his moves and tendencies as a kid, Collins was suddenly matched up against the future Hall of Famer on the court.

They went back and forth, rookie against legend, for a few minutes before Nowitzki went into a move Collins knew all too well. Nowitzki worked into the midrange, backing Collins toward the hoop, when he twisted to his right and pump-faked a shot. Collins jumped ... and hacked him, sending Nowitzki to the free throw line.

Collins could only shake his head.

“You know, I’ve been watching that move for a long time,” Collins told Nowitzki later in the game. “You would have thought I would have figured it out by now."

“Well, that’s all I had for you,” Nowitzki replied. “I couldn’t get by you any other way.”

Two years later, the tides have turned. Nowitzki — along with many of the other players Collins used to study — is retired and the Mavericks are rebuilding. Collins is part of the next wave of NBA big men, eager to fulfill an important role on a team with championship aspirations.

The student is ready to become the master.

“I know this team needs me,” Collins said. “And I’m ready to take that next step.”

— Joe Freeman | jfreeman@oregonian.com | 503-294-5183 | @BlazerFreeman | Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox