Gregory Wayne Oden, Jr. (born January 22, 1988) is an American basketball player at the center position who is currently a free agent. Oden played basketball for Ohio State University for one season, during which the team was the Big Ten Champion and the tournament runner-up in the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship.

On June 28, 2007, Oden was selected first overall in the 2007 NBA Draft by the Portland Trail Blazers. He underwent microfracture surgery of the knee in September 2007, and missed the entire 2007–08 NBA season as a result. He recovered and made his NBA debut on opening night 2008. On March 15, 2012 he was waived from the Trail Blazers after a long history of injuries.

Oden is currently the "Team Oden" spokesperson for Oregon Mentors, promoting mentoring for kids.

Oden was born in Buffalo, New York, and moved with his family to Terre Haute, Indiana at the age of nine. He attended Sarah Scott Middle School in Terre Haute, where he first played interscholastic basketball. He then relocated with his mother and brother and attended Lawrence North High School in Indianapolis, Indiana which he led to three consecutive Indiana Class 4A basketball championships before graduating in 2006. He was named Parade's High School Co-Player of the Year 2005 (along with Monta Ellis) and 2005 National Boys Basketball Player of the Year, becoming the first junior since LeBron James to be named such. He repeated as Gatorade National Boys Basketball Player of the Year in 2006. Oden was named the 2006 Indiana Mr. Basketball. He was also on the McDonald's All-American Team and played in the All-American game.

Blake Austin Griffin (born March 16, 1989) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Griffin had a renowned high school career at Oklahoma Christian School, winning state titles each of his four years under his father, Tommy Griffin, who was the head coach. He played college basketball for the University of Oklahoma Sooners and was awarded numerous accolades in his second year including the Naismith College Player of the Year, Oscar Robertson Trophy and the John Wooden Award.

Griffin left college after two seasons to enter the 2009 NBA Draft where he was selected first overall by the Clippers. In his first season, he broke his left kneecap, which he injured during the final pre-season game, and underwent surgery missing the entire 2009–10 season. He made his NBA debut as a rookie the following season and was selected as an All-Star, won the 2011 NBA Slam Dunk Contest and was named the NBA Rookie of the Year. In 2011, Sports Illustrated ranked him as one of the NBA's 15 Greatest Rookies of All Time.

Shane Courtney Battier (born September 9, 1978) is an American professional basketball player. He currently plays with the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association. He has also been a member of the U.S. national team.

Battier was born and raised in Birmingham, Michigan, and attended Detroit Country Day School in Beverly Hills, Michigan, where he won many awards including 1997 "Mr. Basketball of Michigan." He went on to play four years of college basketball at Duke, where he captured the 2001 National Championship and swept the major National Player of the Year awards. Battier was selected with the sixth overall pick of the 2001 NBA Draft by the Vancouver Grizzlies and was traded five years later to the Houston Rockets. He was then traded back to the Memphis Grizzles during the 2010-2011 NBA season. His number has been retired by both Detroit Country Day School and Duke University. He is widely known for his aggressive defense and being able to guard the league's best players.

Battier was an outlier from his childhood; by the time he entered Country Day as a seventh-grader, he was already 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m), and was 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m) a year later. He was also the only child in the school with a black father and a white mother. 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 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 also noted that his cerebral approach to the game was forged from that time: