A Salute To The Retiring Shane Battier

He won an NCAA National Championship with Duke, and two more with the Miami Heat, but Shane Battier is following through on his plans to retire after the 2013-14 season concluded Sunday night. The eminently quotable Battier played for 13 seasons, and at 35, he’s set to join ESPN’s college basketball coverage for next season.

We’ll always remember the “no-stats all-star” Battier from his famous New York Times profile by best-selling author/journalist Michael Lewis in 2007.

This was before everyone on your Twitter timeline (most people didn’t have Twitter at the time, since it was launched in the summer of 2006) grumpily tweeted out dense statistical minutiae refuting the efficiency of popular players.

Battier was already at the forefront of the quantitative NBA movement during Daryl Morey‘s first year in Houston, but he had always been the cerebral player — one who’d just assume set a killer screen, or throw the perfect bounce pass then take a guy one-on-one. Except it was Battier’s lock-down defense, particularly on offensive juggernaut Kobe Bryant, that stuck out in his prime years before he became a 3&D power forward in Miami’s championship-winning small-ball lineups.

Batter knew the Heat were in trouble even before most of us did for this year’s NBA Finals series, and his prescience should not be dismissed as 20/20 hindsight; the guy just knew the game so well.

Battier says he was worried about series when he looked at Heat's defensive ranking before the Finals. "We were exposed."

— Ethan J. Skolnick (@EthanJSkolnick) June 16, 2014

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Regardless of what sticks out about Battier for you, he’s as gracious a person, as hard-working a player, and as erudite a student of the game as you’re liable to ever encounter in an NBA locker room.