A crossover is a dribble move in which the ball handler switches the ball quickly from one hand to the other in front of the body to change direction and beat a defender.
The crossover is the dribble move every fan can picture. The ball handler, dribbling with one hand, snaps the ball across their body to the other hand and explodes in the new direction, selling the first direction with shoulders and eyes so the defender's weight commits the wrong way. Done at speed, it turns a guarded drive into an open lane in a single bounce.
The move has a celebrated lineage. Tim Hardaway's killer crossover made it a signature in the early 1990s, Allen Iverson's version became the era's most imitated weapon, most famously when he crossed over Michael Jordan as a rookie in 1997, and the move's descendants, the between the legs crossover, the in and out, the hesitation crossover, fill modern highlight vocabulary.
It lives beside a rule, which is why the glossary pairs it with double dribble and carrying debates: the crossover's snap must stay on top of the ball, and palming disputes follow every great handle. In quizzes, crossover questions are identity questions: name the guard whose move it was, and you have named a decade's idea of what ball handling could do to a defender's ankles and reputation.
In use"One sharp crossover left the defender stumbling, and the lane opened to the rim."