Nick Collison was a basketball star in high school at Iowa Falls and led the Cadets to back-to-back state championships in 1998 and 1999.

He was an All-American and the 2003 Big 12 Conference player of the year at the University of Kansas and played in two Final Fours.

It was expected that Iowa Falls retire his No. 44 and for KU to hang his No. 4 in the rafters of Allen Fieldhouse.

Having his No. 4 retired by the only NBA franchise he played for over a 15-year career was much more unlikely.

But Oklahoma City did just that Wednesday tonight.

So, how does a player with career averages of 5.9 points and 5.2 rebounds per game become the first player to have his number retired by the Thunder?

By playing basketball the right way. By being a great teammate. By offering consistency to a franchise that moved from Seattle to Oklahoma City after his fourth season.

That "right way" of playing basketball is exemplified in a moment from 2012, at the height of the Thunder’s nascent but nearly immediately successful existence, the year Collison accompanied the meteoric Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant and James Harden to the NBA Finals.

More:Watch Nick Collison's jersey retirement ceremony in Oklahoma City

In the fourth installment of a 2012 series of guest blogs for GQ titled “How To Survive in the NBA When You're Not a Superstar,” Collison detailed all of the ways he made his presence invaluable to a team brimming with superstars. To him, it was all about a commitment to sublimating your own desire for individual success and prioritizing team success.

“The hard part is being able to have the focus to do it over and over again, knowing you aren’t going to get a lot of credit,” Collison wrote. “Doing a great job of talking on defense won’t get you any high-paying endorsement deals. Nobody is making a YouTube mix of all your badass screens with a Rick Ross track playing over it. (I’m not saying I would complain if someone did this for me.)”

In response, the "highlight" reel Collison hoped for was posted to YouTube. A bass-heavy beat soundtracks footage of his seemingly minor but difference-making basketball contributions — taking charges on defense, setting screens for and passing to the team's stars on offense.

Seven years later, about a year after his retirement, the man known as Mr. Thunder is being honored by the team to which he dedicated his entire professional career with a jersey retirement ceremony.

MORE:Russell Westbrook spotted in Des Moines for Nick Collison's retirement party

Collison will become the only native Iowan to have ever had his jersey retired by an NBA team. He will also have the third-lowest career scoring average out of any player to have their jersey retired by an NBA team. He and his former Supersonics coach Nate McMillan, who also spent his entire career with the franchise and was known as Mr. Sonic, both scored 5.9 points per game.

The Denver Nuggets' Nate Thurmond (5) and the Cleveland Cavaliers' Byron Beck (4.7) are the only players who averaged fewer points in their career and had their jerseys retired.

This is a testament to how much of Collison’s contributions live outside the box score and in the ineffable qualities of hustle, grit and high-level basketball intelligence.

Collison credits his family with providing him the support he needed for the humility and self-awareness it took to make a career playing professional basketball.

“I was fortunate to be taught how to play and to value things like, 'What can you do to help the team win?'" Collison said recently. “I think it served me well in the NBA because I needed to affect the game in ways other than scoring because I wasn't talented enough to go create a shot and create enough offense every single night.

"I wasn't one of those guys in the league, but I was able to stick around and be effective and help teams win for a long time, being able to play a really important role on one of the best teams in the league for multiple years.

“I just think being able to learn how to affect the game in different ways and do your job and just the consistency of it, every day, is the hard part, but that's really the best way to go about it and that's how I built my career.”

Collison learned how to play basketball the right way growing up in Iowa, first in Fort Dodge and then in Iowa Falls, where his father, Dave Collison, was the basketball coach. Like any small town Iowan, he played every sport at first, only focusing on basketball when his aptitude for the game forced him to narrow his focus.

Collison earned McDonald’s All-American honors in 1999 as a senior at Iowa Falls and had his number 44 jersey and shorts retired by the school.

Playing alongside fellow Iowan and future NBA peer Kirk Hinrich, Collison made starring contributions to a KU team that reached the Final Four in 2002 and 2003.

By the end of his college career, he would hold the all-time scoring record in the Big 12. He now stands all-time among conference scorers.

The 2003 NBA draft was a historic one that included NBA greats LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade as four of the first five picks. Hinrich was chosen seventh and Collison 12th.

He went from scoring 18 points and playing 32 minutes per game as a senior at KU to about 5.6 points and 17 minutes per game as a rookie for the Supersonics.

The role change has left many young players in the NBA frustrated, and completely derailed the careers of others. But not Collison.

MORE:Iowan Nick Collison gets special tribute from Oklahoma City Thunder teammate Russell Westbrook

Throughout the struggles of the Supersonics' twilight years, in which the team only had one winning season after drafting Collison in 2003 and through the franchise’s tumultuous transformation into the Oklahoma City Thunder, an event he was a vocal critic of, Collison’s commitment to consistency made him a stabilizing force.

Rebuilding phases for an NBA team can be long and painful. Generally, if you aren’t one of the team’s most essential players, it's likely you will be traded away for future draft picks or cheaper roleplayers, or left unsigned. But the franchise, considering Mr. Thunder’s value and the necessity of the stability he provided on and off the court, kept him around.

In the final Supersonics season in 2007-2008, the team had a record of 20-62. By the Thunder’s second season in 2009-2010, the team had won 55 games. The team would only miss the playoffs once between 2009 and 2018 when Collison retired.

A lot of the credit for this transformation belongs to the string of once-in-a-lifetime players the Thunder drafted during this time, but Collison was there as well, shaping the team's identity and showing up, game after game, as an essential aspect of the team’s foundation and doing what needed to be done.

The values first instilled in him while playing in small gyms across rural Iowa and the unwavering support of his family — his father, his mother Judy, his brother and sister, and his daughter — are what Collison believes were the driving forces of his unique career.

“I’ve always just known they were going to be there and be supportive. I've taken it for granted at times.” Collison said. “I think the way they were with me before I got into basketball is what allowed me to be secure in myself, to be able to be okay with accepting any type of role because of the way I was raised. I had that support all the time, I wasn't trying to be something I wasn't. The cool thing about this is that it's more for our whole family. This run that I've been able to have, I've been able to have because of my family.”

As Collison settles into retirement, spending more time in Kansas City to be closer to his daughter and working for the Thunder’s front office, basketball continues to be an integral part of life for the entire Collison family.

Michael Collison, Nick’s brother and 10 years his junior, has taken up his father’s mantle as a coach for the Iowa Falls-Alden boys' basketball team. He was in sixth grade when his older brother was drafted by the Supersonics and spent his own basketball career, first at Iowa Falls then at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, in Nick's shadow.

Like Nick, Michael found his place in basketball by staying humble and looking for the best way to make use of his talents. The Collison brothers plan on seeing more of each other now. Nick will return to Iowa Falls this spring for a clinic and has plans to get more involved in the community.

Katie Heither, Nick and Michael’s oldest sister, is often referred to by the Collisons as the family’s best athlete. Like Nick, she played every sport Iowa Falls had to offer, including basketball. She continued to play at Ellsworth Community College before transferring to the University of Northern Iowa.

Basketball still remains a big part of her life as an academic advisor at DMACC and mother as the tradition lives on through her two young children who currently play in the Ankeny Centennial youth programs.

“They always talk about how it takes a village to raise people,” Heither said, reflecting on her brother’s career and basketball’s role in her family’s lives. “I would like to think we've been really supportive and I think he would say that. That's the thing I've always wanted him to feel: we're there for him, we're not there because he plays basketball, we're there for him because he's our brother and our family. We support each other no matter what. Whether that means we're going to the NBA finals or Michael's first game of the season or whatever, we support each other.”

According to Michael Collison, “Basketball doesn't stop for the Collisons, it just changes.”

That makes Nick Collison’s jersey retirement at Chesapeake Energy Arena just another chapter in the Collison’s long and ongoing basketball journey.

Follow the Register on Facebook and Twitter for more news. Aaron Calvin can be contacted at acalvin@dmreg.com or on Twitter @aaronpcalvin.