Nique Clifford never had a backup plan.

His parents, Akai and Angel, told him as a teenager he should probably think of what he might want to do with his life if the whole basketball thing didn’t work out.

Clifford never came up with one. And that’s OK, because on Wednesday night he will hear his name called in the first round of the NBA draft.

It’s been a long, winding road for the kid from Colorado Springs and The Vanguard School, but he’s never felt destined to do anything else.

“What I’m meant to do is play in the NBA one day,” Clifford recalled telling his parents growing up. “I’ve always had this dream and passion.”

In reality, it was his parents who first set him on this path. Clifford’s full given first name is Dominique, an homage to his father’s favorite player, Hall of Famer and Atlanta Hawks legend Dominique Wilkins.

Clifford has had a basketball in his hands since the day he was born in 2002 and grew up loving the game. He was a standout player in the Pikes Peak area in junior high and the early part of high school, but the time Clifford’s NBA dreams began to seem not so far fetched was the summer between his sophomore and junior years at the Vanguard School.

He went from 5-foot-11 to 6-foot-4 and all the point guard skills he had acquired over the previous seasons were quite useful to the kid who was now the tallest on the court. He dominated the CHSAA Class 3A level and led a tiny school of about 300 kids to the state championship game.

There is one moment from that season that Vanguard coach Joe Wetters will never forget.

It was during a home game against Manitou Springs. Clifford caught the ball on the right wing, launched a 3-pointer and immediately knew it was off line. The ball bounced off the side of the rim and into the air. Before anyone could blink, Clifford was soaring through the air and above the other nine players on the court. In one swift motion, he caught the ball near the rim and slammed it through the hoop with one hand.

“I was speechless,” Wetters told The Denver Gazette. “How could someone do that? Let alone a 16-year-old kid. That was like the signature moment of, ‘Wow, he’s definitely different than everybody else.’”

That’s when his college recruitment took off. Colorado, Colorado State and Wyoming came after him the hardest and Clifford eventually settled on the Buffaloes. He thought he was going to be a one-and-done player and wind up as part of the 2021 NBA draft class.

But Clifford played just 56 total minutes across 14 games as a freshman at the end of Tad Boyle’s bench.

As a sophomore, he became a starter midway through the season and flashed his NBA-caliber athleticism. A poster dunk against USC in January of that season is one of the top highlights at CU Events Center in recent years.

But as a junior and a full-time starter, Clifford’s game took a step back. He averaged fewer points and rebounds, committed more fouls and turnovers and shot much worse from the field and 3-point range than he did in this previous season. His stat line from his junior season is something Boyle still keeps on a whiteboard in his office in Boulder.

“It has his field-goal percentage, his 3-point field-goal percentage, his free-throw percentage, his assist-to-turnover ratio… and his name’s not on it. He played 22 minutes a game that year. He started 33 out of 35 games and it wasn’t a good year for Nique,” Boyle said in March.

Clifford began to doubt he would reach his goal of playing in the NBA. After CU recruited five-star high school prospect Cody Williams at Clifford’s position, Clifford knew he had to leave Boulder to still give himself that chance. He wound up at one of the schools he had spurned back in high school: Colorado State.

When Clifford arrived in Fort Collins two summers ago, the Rams coaches had no idea if he would even start.

“Honestly, we debated it all the time because only two of three (of Clifford, Jalen Lake and Josiah Strong) could start,” said CSU head coach Ali Farokhmanesh, then an assistant. “We had no idea. The way he bought into his development (and) how we wanted to develop him, he stuck to that process. From the moment he got here, he still had that belief in him. It was (about) building his confidence back up. There’s a reason why he is where is (now).”

Farokhmanesh was at the center of Clifford finding his confidence again. They spent countless hours on the court together working on his game. Clifford became the perfect sidekick to Rams star Isaiah Stevens. Together, they helped lead CSU to the 2024 NCAA Tournament. After the best season of his college career, Clifford tested the NBA draft waters.

His decision came down to the final hours before he ultimately decided to return to the Rams for a fifth and final season of college basketball.

“It was a tough decision,” Clifford told The Denver Gazette.

It couldn’t have worked out better. He became an All-American honorable-mention pick and the star the Rams needed in their first season in five years without Stevens. He led the team in points, rebounds, assists and steals and did so while shooting efficiently from all three levels.

“Nique had to fail before he got success. I always joke with him, had he just come to Colorado State (out of high school), he would be in his second year in the NBA,” Farokhmanesh said with a laugh. “He had to go through that process of failing and things not working out at Colorado to see what he needed to work on.”

After leading the Rams to back-to-back March Madness appearances for the first time in over a decade — and the first appearance in the second round in that same amount of time — Clifford has become a likely first round draft pick. He earned an invitation to the NBA draft green room Wednesday night in Brooklyn. 

If Clifford had stayed in the draft a year ago, he likely would have gone undrafted.

“I think he just guards so many different positions, but then he’s also a playmaker, too,” Farokhmanesh said. “He’s not ‘three-and-D,’ really. He can play (defense) and he can make threes, but he also can make plays for other people and that’s what he got to show this year. I think last year he was just looked at as a ‘three-and-D’ guy. This year he’s a secondary point guard, in a lot of ways. That’s why his draft stock changed, to me.”

Over the past few weeks, as Clifford has auditioned himself for half of the NBA, he hasn’t lost sight of the people and places that helped shape him. Before going to Chicago for the draft combine, he returned to Fort Collins to work out with Farokhmanesh.

Recently, Clifford played the role of best man at the wedding of one of his childhood friends — something he told NBA teams he wouldn’t miss for a workout.

“At the end of the day, what’s more important is those relationships,” Clifford said.

Clifford knows he no longer has control of where he goes next. He has no idea which team will pick him in the draft.

“I just wanna be a part of a winning organization. So whether that’s starting from ground up and I get time right away to help build a program, or go into a team that I do get to play impact minutes to find ways to win, ultimately it’s just going somewhere where I feel like I could grow and have an opportunity and be around good people,” Clifford said.

That’s what his inner circle wants, too.

As Clifford is standing next to NBA commissioner Adam Silver and donning a new hat Wednesday night, all Wetters will see is the third grader he met for the first time in a Physical Education class 15 years ago.

“He’s genuinely the same kid that I met when he was 8 years old,” Wetters said. “He’s very humble. He’s very kind to people. He’s always been a hard worker, going above and beyond. School’s always been super important to him. The intangibles, doing all the right things and having good character, those things were always important to him.

“Watching him grow up from a skinny little kid in third grade wearing goggles (with) arms and legs too long for his body to this specimen of a man now, it’s pretty intense. And I’m happy that he’s getting to have this moment because he’s always giving something to everyone else.”