Shane Battier

The Houston Rockets are an American professional basketball team based in Houston, Texas. The team plays in the Southwest Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association . The team was established in 1967, and played in San Diego, California for four years, before being... moved to Houston. In the Rockets' debut season, they won only 15 games. But after drafting Elvin Hayes first overall in the 1969 NBA Draft, they made their first appearance in the playoffs in 1969. After Hayes was traded, Moses Malone was acquired to replace him. Malone won two MVPs during his time in Houston, and he led the Rockets to the conference finals in his first year with the Rockets. He also took the Rockets to the NBA Finals in 1981, but they were defeated in six games by the Boston Celtics. In 1984, the Rockets drafted Hakeem Olajuwon, who led them to the 1986 Finals in his second year, where they lost again to Boston. In the next seven seasons, they lost in the first round of the playoffs five times. They did not win their first championship until 1994, when Olajuwon led them to the finals. The team repeated as champions in 1995.
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Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B. Duke established The Duke Endowment, at which... time the institution changed its name to honor his deceased father, Washington Duke. Duke is organized into two undergraduate and ten graduate and professional schools. The university's research expenditures topped $657 million in 2009, placing it amongst the largest ten in the nation. In its 2012 edition, U.S. News & World Report ranked the university's undergraduate program 10th among national universities, while ranking the medical, law, public policy, nursing, and business graduate programs among the top 12 in the United States. In the 2011 QS World University Rankings, Duke ranked 19th worldwide. The university has "historical, formal, on-going, and symbolic ties" with the United Methodist Church, but is a nonsectarian and independent institution.
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Birmingham is a city in Oakland County of the U.S. state of Michigan and an affluent suburb of Detroit. As of the 2010 census, the population was 20,103. The city's downtown attracts shoppers throughout the Metro Detroit area. The area comprising what is now the city of Birmingham was part of land... ceded by Native American tribes to the United States government by the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. However, settlement was delayed first by the War of 1812 and subsequently by an unfavorable report by the Surveyor-General of the United States, Edward Tiffin, regarding the placement of Military Bounty Lands for veterans of the War of 1812. Tiffin's report claimed that "There would not be an acre out of a hundred, if there would be one out of a thousand that would, in any case, admit cultivation." In 1818, Territorial Governor Lewis Cass led a group of men along the Indian Trail. The governor's party discovered that the swamp was not as extensive as Tiffin had supposed. Not long after Cass issued a more encouraging report about the land, interest quickened in its suitability for settlement. The earliest land entry was made on January 28, 1819, by Colonel Benjamin K.
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