How Chicago Winters, A Basement and Voit Basketball Helped Tim Hardaway Develop The Crossover

Former Miami Heat guard Tim Hardaway is considered one of the best dribblers in NBA history.

Throughout his career, he was known as the player with the "Killer Crossover. On Friday, a day before his is inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Hardaway spoke of the move's origin.

"Back in the day, in the 70s, we didn't have Nintendo or X-Box or none of that," Hardaway said Friday, a day before his induction. We had three channels on TV, 32, 2, 5, 7. We had an unfished basement and I used to go down, and I lived in the city of Chicago, where it was freezing cold. Sometimes, it was no place to go. Sometimes, you couldn't go outside because it's too cold."

How did Tim Hardaway develop his HOF handles? #22HoopClass

A rubber basketball and lots of imagination 💭 pic.twitter.com/Cbu1J4MPdY
— NBA (@NBA) September 9, 2022

The move, which left many defenders in slow motion, was a result of hours of practicing in the basement during winter months.

"I used to go down in the basement and just dribble," Hardaway said. "We had two beams down there. I don't know if y'all remember, it was a Voit basketball. It's like a rubber basketball. If you put too much too much air in it, it's like one of those balls that bounces and it just goes. So you had to put the right amount of air in that ball so it won't break your finger or bounce all over the place. I'd just go downstairs for about two hours and I'd just dribble. I'd just imagine people that I'm playing against. I'm going through real live action in the basement and that's how I learned to dribble. That's how my dribbling became effective. That's why I'm very confident in my dribble and that's probably where the crossover came from.

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Shandel Richardson is the Miami Heat writer for Inside The Heat. He can also be read in the Sportsbook Review for gambling coverage from around the NBA.