Allen iverson crossover7/12/2023 But what he did to that defender, Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time, made the box score an afterthought. The six-foot-nothing rookie guard with the beginnings of a lollipop ‘fro that would soon become a maze of crop-circle zigzag cornrows couldn’t will his Philadelphia 76ers to a win, even with a 37-point barrage. That night in 1997 was the night I became an Allen Iverson fan. Legalizing traveling via the Eurostep, which is what the NBA has done, is unfair to defenders and detrimental to the evolution of the game.Here’s How Higher Education Dies Adam Harris The league should challenge them to break down defenders and score without breaking rules that make sense. The Eurostep makes things too easy for players like Harden and Antetokounmpo. Today, Kyrie Irving and Steph Curry have taken the crossover to new heights, but if the league had decided to encourage palming, rather than eradicate it, these players wouldn’t have needed to be so inventive. Iverson made that move without the palming he used against Jordan, and in that sense, it’s an even more impressive feat of individual dribbling skill. Iverson’s second-most-famous crossover took place in the 2001 NBA Finals, when he sent Lakers guard Tyronn Lue to the deck. It just forced players to execute the move within the confines of established rules. The NBA’s crackdown on palming didn’t make the crossover disappear. The case of the Iverson crossover is the perfect example. NBA players don’t need that advantage, and they would be even more resourceful if forced to play within the traditional rules. Giving insanely proportioned and remarkably gifted athletes like Antetokounmpo the power to pick up the ball and run past defenders creates an obscene competitive advantage. The Eurostep might be the game’s swag move of the moment, but the NBA should take steps to outlaw it. This makes the move’s relationship to traveling analogous to the Iverson crossover’s relationship to palming: Both cross the line dividing legal from illegal and provide offensive players with an unfair advantage. The problem is that just about every Eurostep entails a minihop taken prior to the first full diagonal step-and therefore adds up to 2½ steps. The individual steps are more like horizontal bounds, and the sudden change of direction midmove tends to leave defenders wrong-footed. Rather than take those two steps in a single direction-generally in a straight line toward the basket, as players have for decades-Eurostepping players take the first step in one direction before reversing course and stepping back the other way, all while maintaining forward momentum. Starting in the mid-2000s, a young Argentinian player named Manu Ginobili popularized the Eurostep, which tests the limits of a rule that allows a player to take two continuous steps after gathering his dribble. His shot went in.Īt about the same time the NBA succeeded in banishing the Iverson crossover, another move made its way into the league. Jordan bit on the fake, freeing Iverson for a clean look. He cupped the ball in his left hand while pushing it as far to his left as he could-feigning intent to move in that direction-before bringing it back across his body at an accelerated speed. Iverson crossed the ball in front of his body from left to right, then back the other way between his legs. As he went to work breaking down his defender, any informed basketball fan watching in real time knew which move he planned to use. Iverson, the front-runner for Rookie of the Year, found himself with the ball near the top of the key, guarded by Jordan. It was the fourth quarter of an otherwise nondescript game in March 1997 between Michael Jordan’s Bulls and Allen Iverson’s 76ers. The NBA Playoffs Supernova Who’s Spoiling Everyone’s Plans Hockey’s Greatest Team Ever Had Only One Path to Humiliation-and They Found It The Weirdest NBA Megastar Career Keeps Getting Weirder
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