Shane Battier

After the conclusion of his college career, Battier was named to the ACC 50th Anniversary men's basketball team.

Shane Courtney Battier (born September 9, 1978) is an American former professional basketball player.

He also worked for ESPN and recently joined the board of Yext.

Battier is best known for his four years playing basketball at Duke, his 13 years playing in the National Basketball Association (NBA), and his participation on the U.S. national team.

His teams won championships at the college, professional, and international levels.

Battier was born and raised in Birmingham, Michigan, and attended Detroit Country Day School in nearby Beverly Hills, where he won many awards including the 1997 Mr. Basketball award.

Battier was an outlier from his childhood; by the time he entered Country Day as a seventh-grader, he was already 6ft 4in, and was 6ft 7in a year later.

He was also the only child in the school with a black father and a white mother.

He led the Duke Blue Devils men's basketball to two Final Fours, in 1999 and 2001, though his team in 1998 squandered a late 17-point lead to eventual national champion Kentucky in the regional finals.

The Blue Devils lost to the Connecticut Huskies in the 1999 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, but came back to win the national championship by defeating the Arizona Wildcats two years later.

In 2001, Battier was a consensus national player of the year with honors including the Naismith, Associated Press and Sporting News College Player of the Year awards; the John R. Wooden Award; and the Oscar Robertson and Adolph Rupp trophies.

He subsequently had his jersey No. 31 retired by the Blue Devils.

Additionally, Battier was a three-time awardee of the NABC Defensive Player of the Year.

Battier (778) and Jason Williams on the 2001 national championship team were one of only two Duke duos to each score over 700 points in a season, the other duo being Jon Scheyer (728) and Kyle Singler (707) in the 2009–10 season.

Battier graduated from Duke with a major in religion.

Battier was a two-time Academic All-American and Academic All-American of the year in 2001.

Battier was selected by the Vancouver Grizzlies with the sixth pick of the first round of the 2001 NBA draft.

At the time, the Grizzlies were in the process of moving from Vancouver to Memphis.

Pau Gasol of Spain was selected in the same draft with the number three pick, by the Atlanta Hawks, then traded to the Vancouver Grizzlies.

Battier was a versatile player with the size to play inside and The Range to score from further out (particularly the corner three-pointer).

However, he made his living as a hustle player on the defensive end, where he defended three positions (shooting guard, power forward, small forward) with a high degree of skill, netted a good number of blocks and steals, dove for loose balls, and frequently drew offensive fouls from his opponent.

On June 28, 2006, Battier was traded by the Grizzlies to the Houston Rockets in exchange for Stromile Swift and the Rockets' number 8 selection Rudy Gay in the 2006 NBA draft.

Battier has often been called "the ultimate glue guy" for playing sound, fundamental, team-oriented basketball, making his teammates more effective without flash or padding his own stats, and for making the most of his skills with discipline and hustle rather than raw athleticism.

He's also known for his extensive preparation in studying the opposing team and the player he is assigned to guard: "I try to prepare for my opponent as thoroughly as possible. I want to know every angle on the man I am guarding to give me an edge. I read many, many pages and go over strengths and weaknesses many times before a game. 'Proper preparation prevents poor performance.' That is a motto I like."

The Rockets made him the team's only player with access to its highly sophisticated statistical data that they compiled on all opposing players; he used this data to become familiar with the tendencies of the players he would guard in each game.

He played for the US national team in the 2006 FIBA World Championship, winning a bronze medal.

In a game between the Rockets and San Antonio Spurs in the 2007–08 season in which he was assigned to guard Manu Ginóbili, because Ginóbili was playing off the bench and his minutes were not in sync with those of typical NBA starters, Battier went to Rockets coach Rick Adelman before the game and asked to be kept out of the starting lineup and substituted in whenever Ginóbili entered the game.

Rockets general manager Daryl Morey later said about the incident, "No one in the NBA does that. No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time."

As Michael Lewis put it in a 2009 article, the young Battier "was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black."

More specifically in the context of basketball, Lewis noted that "the inner-city kids with whom he played on the Amateur Athletic Union (A.A.U.) circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people."

Battier was a three-time Michigan High School Athletic Association Class B state champion with teammates Javin Hunter and David Webber.

Battier graduated from Detroit Country Day School with a 3.96 grade point average and was named the school's outstanding student in his senior year.

He went on to attend Duke, where he played four years under head coach Mike Krzyzewski.

While at Duke, Battier was often the best defender on the court.

He frequently took charges which prompted the Cameron Crazies to chant, "Who's your daddy? Battier!"

He was second behind Jon Scheyer in the Duke record book for minutes played in a single season as of March 28, 2010, and had 36 double-figure scoring games in a single season (tied for 5th-most in Duke history, with Scheyer, Jason Williams, and JJ Redick).

On February 17, 2010, in a game against the Milwaukee Bucks, Battier scored 20 points, shooting 6–6 from 3-point territory, to go along with his 10 rebounds.

During the latter part of the season, Battier lost his starting spot to the returning Trevor Ariza.

Battier, however, made it perfectly clear that starting a game or hearing his name before a game was not important to him.

Battier also held the unofficial record among NCAA Division I men's players for most games won in a career with 131, a record that would fall in 2017 to Gonzaga's Przemek Karnowski.