Tag: Penny Hardaway

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Sports Tiger Blue

Tigers Tip-Off Hardaway’s Fifth Season with New Roster

Penny Hardaway (photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

The pinnacle of the Coach Penny Hardaway era at the University of Memphis — now four years and counting — was halftime of the Tigers’ NCAA tournament game against Gonzaga on March 19, 2022. Playing in the program’s first “March Madness” since 2014, Memphis led the country’s top-ranked team by 10 points, a spot in the Sweet 16 (for the first time since 2009) there for the taking. Alas, Tiger shooting went cold, the Zags rallied, and another season ended for the U of M and its considerable fan base.

Among the 10 players who played in that game for Memphis, seven have moved on. And here’s the twist to that reality: All seven could have returned for another season in blue and gray. Everyone knew star freshman Jalen Duren was “one and done” and he was chosen by Charlotte with the 13th pick in the NBA draft (then traded to Detroit). Josh Minott went to Minnesota in the second round and Lester Quinones also found his way to the pros (Golden State, as an undrafted free agent). But also gone, via transfer, are Landers Nolley, Tyler Harris, Earl Timberlake, and last year’s recruiting sensation, Emoni Bates. Those seven players would make a rotation all but certain to qualify for another Big Dance. Instead, Hardaway was left to build his fifth roster virtually from scratch.

Such is life with the transfer portal in modern college hoops. Hardaway pivoted quickly and lured the 2022 American Athletic Conference Player of the Year — point guard Kendric Davis — from SMU. Davis led the AAC with 19.4 points per game last season and will be playing for this third program in five years (he spent the 2018-19 season at TCU). Two other transfers — both guards — may well find themselves in Hardaway’s starting lineup for the season opener at Vanderbilt (November 7th): Keonte Kennedy (late of UTEP) and Elijah McCadden (Georgia Southern). Kennedy averaged 14.1 points and pulled down 6.1 rebounds per game last season for the Miners while McCadden’s numbers with the Eagles were 11.7 and 4.6, good enough for the Sun Belt’s Sixth Man honors.

“We’re an older group,” acknowledges McCadden (a fifth-year senior), “so we’re gelling. We know what we’re here to do. We want to win. We have one main goal, and not a lot of years to grow together. We’ll make the most of the short time we have.”

There will, in fact, be a few familiar faces in uniform for the Tigers. Guard Alex Lomax has spent a full decade — since middle school — playing for Hardaway and returns for a fifth college season. (Remember, players were granted a bonus year of eligibility when the pandemic restricted play in 2020-21.) Then there’s forward DeAndre Williams, back for a third season with the Tigers at the tender age of 26. Williams was second to Duren on last year’s team in both scoring (11.1 points per game) and rebounds (5.8). Expect both figures to grow this season for Williams, named (along with Davis) to the AAC’s preseason all-conference team.

“As a unit, they have to do more than play basketball,” says Hardaway. “They have to hang together off the court. Understand each other on all levels. That carries over. They have to develop an identity early: Who do we want to be? And live up to that identity every single night. I want it to be about toughness. And defense.”

Even with the roster turnover, the offseason was good to Hardaway. The program is finally out from under a three-year cloud, an NCAA-mandated agency (IARP) all but absolving Hardaway from wrongdoing in the recruiting of James Wiseman. So no suspension and no exclusion from upcoming NCAA tournaments (should the Tigers qualify). Then in October, the U of M announced a six-year contract extension that should keep Hardaway on the Memphis bench at least until 2028. Plenty of time for this city’s most famous basketball son to win his first conference title (the Tigers were picked to finish second, behind Houston) and get his alma mater back to the Sweet 16 or, dare it be dreamed, the Final Four.

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News Sports

U of M/Penny Hardaway Dodge Major NCAA Charges

Larry Kuzniewski

The University of Memphis and its basketball coach, Penny Hardaway, emerged mostly unscathed following a three-year investigation into its recruiting practices by the NCAA.

The university received a $5,000 fine and must forfeit two games in which former top recruit James Wiseman participated. Additionally, the university was placed on probation for three years, but will be allowed to participate in the NCAA tournament in 2023 and afterward, notwithstanding any further violations.

The NCAA determined that Hardaway, as a UM “booster” prior to his hiring in 2018, provided money and other benefits to students in the Memphis area, but his activities did not constitute a major NCAA infraction since he was not employed by the school, and some of his gifts were to non-UM recruits. The university was also cited for several Level II and Level III violations, but avoided any major penalties from the NCAA.

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Penny Hardaway, Wellengood Partners to Open New Restaurant Downtown

(Credit: Westin Memphis Beale Street)

Go ahead and add “restaurateur” to Penny Hardaway’s CV. The former NBA star and current Memphis Tigers basketball coach is set to open a new restaurant just a quick jaunt from the FedEx Forum.

In partnership with Wellengood Partners and Gourmet Services, Inc., Hardaway will introduce Penny’s Nitty Gritty, a “unique, upscale restaurant with a touch of added Southern flair” at The Westin Memphis Beale Street. Gourmet Services corporate executive chef Elizabeth A. Rodgers is curating the menu; diners can expect specialty items like collard green fondue, a Penny Loaf, and some other of Hardaway’s favorite dishes.

“I wanted a concept that would serve the best food to my family, friends, and visitors to Memphis. I wanted people who come to the restaurant to have a first-class experience,” said Hardaway. “When I tasted food from the menu, I was blown away, and I know others will be too.”

“Penny Hardaway is a Memphis basketball icon,” said Glenn Malone, CEO of Wellengood Partners. “With the University of Memphis Tigers’ home court at the FedEx Forum across the street from The Westin, Penny’s Nitty Gritty is the best place to get something to eat before or after a game, or other events taking place Downtown.”

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Sports Tiger Blue

Signature Season Nears for Memphis Tigers

Penny Hardaway (photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

If you track the last half-century of University of Memphis basketball, you’ll find a lot of success on the hardwood. You’ll also find what amounts to a signature season in virtually every decade. In 1973, Larry Finch, Ronnie Robinson, and Larry Kenon took an unforgettable Tiger team all the way to the championship game before falling to mighty UCLA. The 1985 Tigers returned to the Final Four in Keith Lee’s final season. In 1992, a sophomore sensation by the name of Penny Hardaway led an overlooked Tiger squad to the Elite Eight. Then in 2008, freshman Derrick Rose and a group of veteran stars went 38-2, losing an overtime heartbreaker to Kansas for the national championship. Four decades . . . four signature seasons.

Then, we had the 2010s. Nary a losing season, but also nary a signature season. The Tigers reached the NCAA tournament four straight years (2011-14), but never advanced to the second weekend (Sweet 16). Tubby Smith’s two years as coach (2016-18) were as awkward as Josh Pastner’s final two. Penny Hardaway — the greatest living Tiger legend — took over the program in 2018, but needed four seasons to lead a team to the Big Dance.

And what a dance it appeared to be for the 2021-22 Tigers. After beating Boise State in the opening round, Memphis led Gonzaga — the top-ranked team in the country — by 10 points at halftime before falling, 82-78, last Saturday in Portland. A lengthy tournament drought is over, but it’s now been 13 years without a Sweet 16 appearance for Memphis. And 14 years, really, since something we could call a signature season in these parts.

That special season is coming. If the Tigers’ battle with the Zags isn’t enough to convince you, consider their two beatings of the Houston Cougars, one by 10 points at Houston in February, the other by 14 points at FedExForum in March. The Cougars, you might be aware, play Villanova Saturday for a chance at a second-straight Final Four appearance. The Memphis Tigers are “there” without quite being there. Back, but not entirely.

After the Tigers handled Houston in their regular-season finale on March 6th, Hardaway noted the culture change that took place around his team as they reeled off 10 wins in their final 11 games. “We understood what the mission was. The way we could lock in, we weren’t looking ahead. Every game: 1 and 0. Staying in the moment, putting ourselves in a position to compete. We locked down, and relied on one another.”

We relied on one another. Are there any five words that more honestly capture the meaning of a team? The meaning of a team’s mission? The Tigers came up short of the program’s goal — certainly Penny Hardaway’s goal — this winter, but there seems to be a template now in place, one the coach and his returning players can utilize in seasons to come.

Not every player will return, of course. Jalen Duren — the American Athletic Conference’s Freshman of the Year — will be playing in the NBA a year from now, a sure lottery pick in June’s draft. Another freshman, Josh Minott, is departing for the professional ranks. The NCAA transfer portal is open for any and all other Tigers to move on should they feel greener pastures lie elsewhere. That portal is just as open for Hardaway to add an impact player or two for the 2022-23 campaign.

As for adjustments, Hardaway would be wise to emphasize the value of November and December to a college basketball team. A four-game losing streak after the Tigers opened last season with five victories made the rest of the schedule a climb to respectability and seriously compromised chances Memphis might land a seed higher than ninth for the NCAA tournament. Secure those non-conference games, then flex muscle in AAC play and you have the makings of, yes, a signature season.

We now know what a decade without a signature season in Memphis feels like. When will we enjoy the next one? You can be sure of this: We’ll recognize it when it happens.

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Sports Tiger Blue

Dancin’ Time for Memphis Tigers

Alex Lomax (photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

Ahhh. Now this feels like March. Thursday in Portland, the Memphis Tigers will play Boise State in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The game will take place just shy of eight years since Memphis last played in the Big Dance (a second-round loss to Virginia on March 23, 2014). It’s hard to imagine in these parts, but there are Memphis high-school kids with virtually no memory of the Tigers playing in college basketball’s showcase. After all, it was two American presidents and a pandemic ago. 

In this season’s spirit of renewal, a few not-so-random thoughts on the Tigers’ return to Madness: 

• Just how long was the Tigers’ seven-year drought without a dance card? You have to go all the way back to 1972 to find such a dry period. Then Memphis State, the Tigers did not qualify for the NCAA tournament for 10 years, from 1963 through 1972. In 1972, though, only 25 teams qualified for the tournament. Without a conference championship, a program had little chance of competing for the big prize. Today, it’s a 68-team field. As many as six or seven teams from hoops-rich conferences like the ACC, SEC, or Big 10 make the field. There was no tournament in 2020 as the pandemic took hold, but the Tigers’ seven-year absence from this event is just about as long as we can take.

• It’s been even longer — 13 years — since the Tigers advanced to the tournament’s second weekend, the Sweet 16. Memphis won at least two tournament games four straight years, from 2006 to 2009, reaching the regional finals (“Elite Eight”) three times (2006-08), and the 2008 championship, where the Tigers lost to Kansas in overtime. The program enjoyed a similar four-year run from 1982-85 (the Keith Lee years), reaching the Sweet 16 each season and the Final Four in ’85, where they lost to Villanova in the national semifinals.

• Penny Hardaway is the ninth coach to lead Memphis to the NCAA tournament. He appeared as a player in the 1992 and ’93 tournaments, helping the Tigers reach the Elite Eight as a sophomore. No Memphis coach made it to the Big Dance in his first season at the helm. It took Penny four.

• Larry Kenon scored 34 points in the first round of the 1973 tournament, setting a single-game Memphis record that stood for 36 years. Roburt Sallie — hardly a name that rolls off the tongue of Tiger fans — found his range in the opening game of the 2009 tournament and scored 35 points to establish a new standard.

• The Tigers will be led by a point guard who grew up in Memphis and wears number 10 on his jersey. For fans with some mileage on their tires, this should look familiar. Andre Turner led the Tigers to the NCAA tournament four consecutive years (1983-86), hit a game-winning shot on their way to the 1985 Final Four, and established a career assists record (763) that will never be broken. If Alex Lomax conjures the Little General this month, their could be a lot to celebrate.

• How unique was freshman Jalen Duren’s 21-point, 20-rebound performance in the quarterfinals of the American Athletic Conference tournament? In four full seasons as a Tiger, the great Keith Lee never had a 20-20 game. Ronnie Robinson had three in three seasons. Larry Kenon remarkably had seven 20-20 games in his only college season, helping the Tigers reach the 1973 Final Four. Enjoy Duren in the Big Dance. He’ll be dunking lobs in the NBA a year from now.

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Sports Tiger Blue

New Season for the Memphis Tigers

Landers Nolley II (photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

Rarely does a single game change a college basketball season, much less one played in mid-February. But this may well have happened last Saturday, when the Memphis Tigers upset the 6th-ranked Houston Cougars in Texas. In ending Houston’s 37-game(!) winning streak at the Fertitta Center, Memphis earned its first road win over a top-10 team in 17 years and its second over the country’s 6th-ranked team this season. (Alabama occupied that ranking when the Tigers beat them at FedExForum in December.) For a program that hadn’t beaten a top-10 team since 2014, the 2021-22 campaign has gained a measure of significance, but a return to the NCAA tournament remains the goal. Getting there would end an eight-year drought and change the trajectory of Penny Hardaway’s still-young college coaching career. The Tigers took a significant stride toward a Big Dance ticket by beating Houston.

Three truths we discovered in Saturday’s win:

• The Tigers have a “Big Three.” NBA championships tend to be won by teams with headline trios. Think recently of the Miami Heat (LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh) or the Golden State Warriors (Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Klay Thompson). The Tigers’ victory at Houston established the team’s prime players, once and for all, as Landers Nolley, DeAndre Williams, and Jalen Duren. After missing four recent games with a knee injury, Nolley returned to the starting lineup for the first time since late December and led Memphis with 20 points, hitting four of five three-point attempts. (It’s a good time to remember Nolley was a first-team all-conference selection after the 2020-21 season.) After missing six recent games with a back injury, Williams looked healthy against Houston, scoring 13 points with four assists and three steals. Then there’s Duren, the team’s star freshman and the American Athletic Conference’s top rebounder and shot-blocker. Duren had 14 points and 11 rebounds against the Cougars, his third consecutive double-double.

• For the Tigers’ rotation, tight makes right. Hardaway sent 11 players to the floor in the first half against Houston. (The Cougars led by three points at halftime.) But over the game’s final 20 minutes, he stuck with his starting unit: the big three, plus Alex Lomax and Lester Quinones. Among reserves, only senior Tyler Harris played as many as 11 minutes. Depth is overrated in college basketball. There are four media timeouts every half. Players get “breathers” every time someone takes a free throw. Hardaway has finally landed on the starting five that appears capable of winning big games in March. It’s the players’ responsibility to avoid foul trouble and the coach’s responsibility to play them every minute he can.

• Free throws win games. Memphis fans didn’t need Saturday’s win to learn this lesson. It was delivered like a kick in the crotch near the end of the 2008 NCAA championship. Memphis teams have not been known for hitting free throws consistently, or in big moments. This year’s squad entered the Houston game shooting 66 percent from the foul line . . . 321st in the country. (Houston was 320th.) When Williams was fouled on a heave as the shot-clock expired with 1:35 left in Saturday’s game, the Tigers led by only three points (56-53). Williams made his three free throws, and the Tigers, as a team, connected on 10 more — without a miss — over the game’s final 90 seconds to make the final score (69-59) look like an easy victory. They’re called “free” for a reason. 

Much remains to be gained in a season suddenly captivating for longtime Tiger fans. A pair of road games this week — at Cincinnati Tuesday and at SMU Sunday — could go either way, and a pair of losses would toss Memphis back on the infamous “bubble” when it comes to NCAA tournament consideration. But a pair of wins, then strong showings at home to end the regular season could make the AAC tournament not so critical for the Tigers’ chances at an at-large berth. A mercurial team has won five games in a row. And on a special Saturday afternoon in Houston, that team raised its ceiling for achievement considerably.

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Sports Tiger Blue

Penny’s Perspective

Penny Hardaway (photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

Embarrassing.

That was the trigger word. Last Thursday, a reporter asked Penny Hardaway if he was embarrassed after his Memphis Tigers’ latest disappointment, an eight-point loss to SMU that left the team — once ranked 9th in the country — 9-8 for the season. The fourth-year basketball coach forgot about the lights, cameras, and recorders, and let it be known how he felt.

“Stop asking me stupid f*****g questions about if I feel like I can do something. … I’m coaching really hard, my boys are playing really hard. I’m not embarrassed about nothing.”

It was hard to witness, knowing Hardaway’s stature in this town. Since taking the job in March 2018, Hardaway has brought dignity and composure to almost every public appearance. He’s been angry, frustrated, impatient. His teams, to date, have under-performed. But he’s kept himself together under a spotlight no other Memphian would welcome. That composure cracked last Thursday. [Hardaway apologized via Instagram on Friday, at least “to my school, to the players and to our fans.” No mention of “this media” that stirred him so the night before.]

Consider the word embarrassing and its association to Hardaway in the context of basketball. This is a man who, as a player, performed in the NBA Finals, All-Star games, the Olympics. Rarely was he embarrassed in sneakers and shorts on a basketball court. He took up coaching a decade ago and did nothing but win at the middle school and high school levels. There was nothing embarrassing about winning three state championships at East High School. (The James Wiseman controversy surfaced later. Depending on your view, that qualifies as embarrassing for either Hardaway or the NCAA.)

A revealing detail about Hardaway’s angry reaction to the “embarrassing” question: It came after he said this: “Right now, we aren’t fighting hard enough. This isn’t a Memphis team.” This isn’t a Memphis team. Those five words are the equivalent of … embarrassment. One standard (Hardaway’s personal success, now connected to the historical success of the Memphis program) exceeds the current standard, enough for the coach to disassociate his current players with the very brand (the University of Memphis) they represent. If Hardaway isn’t embarrassed, he wouldn’t want to acknowledge the other emotion his comments suggest: shame. “My boys are playing really hard” … but against SMU, at least, they aren’t a Memphis team?

A Memphis team showed up at Tulsa Sunday, the Tigers erasing a 13-point halftime deficit to win their first game on the Golden Hurricane’s floor since 2012. Memphis played shorthanded again, with DeAndre Williams, Landers Nolley, and Jalen Duren all nursing injuries. Star turns from Tyler Harris and Josh Minott off the bench were enough to beat the American Athletic Conference’s cellar dweller. Hardaway could, metaphorically speaking, catch his breath and say all the right things about a road victory.

The coach’s job will likely grow heavier, because the current team (now 10-8 and 4-4 in the AAC) is a long shot for the NCAA tournament. Missing the Big Dance would make it eight years in a row, half of those on Hardaway’s watch. His comments last Thursday night were Hardaway’s first confession that he understands and feels the pressure of history on his beloved alma mater. It was the rare chance for those who watch, analyze, and discuss a hometown hero to see and hear what that hometown hero thinks from his own perspective. 

Athletes — and coaches — are rarely their best in front of cameras after a loss. Penny Hardaway will surely have better moments (and better press conferences) in the days to come. The best athletes are able to forget poor outings and regain peak performance. An embarrassing press conference? Coaches and communities as attached as Hardaway and Memphis forget those, too.

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Sports Tiger Blue

When the “Smoke” Clears

Emoni Bates (Photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

It appears the 2021-22 Memphis Tigers will leave their mark on the history books. Or maybe we should call it a scar. Unless they manage to win the American Athletic Conference tournament in March — and thus qualify for the program’s first NCAA tournament in eight years — these Tigers will lead conversations about the most disappointing teams in U of M history. A team that opened the season ranked 12th in the AP poll — and many felt that position wasn’t high enough — is currently 9-7 and nowhere near the Top 25. Worse, the Tigers are merely 3-3 in the AAC (despite wins over Wichita State and Cincinnati). Six AAC teams have fewer league losses, with Houston (4-0) at the top of the standings.

The Tigers’ latest face-plant occurred last Saturday at East Carolina, when Memphis blew a 10-point lead over the game’s final three minutes and lost by a single point on a buzzer-beater. The game came down to the Tigers defending an in-bounds play with a single second left on the clock. They didn’t. The ECU crowd stormed the court and the Tigers flew home, tail firmly tucked between their legs. Again.

These Tigers rarely play at full strength. Covid protocols and injuries have reduced coach Penny Hardaway’s once-too-deep roster to as few as six or seven scholarship players at times. Perhaps the Tigers beat the Pirates last weekend if DeAndre Williams and Landers Nolley had played. Surely they beat Tulane on December 29th had Williams and freshman sensation Emoni Bates not been sidelined. (They lost by a single point.)

But the limited roster isn’t an excuse, not as measured over the course of a full season. The Tigers faced Georgia with the Bulldogs down their top guard. The Bulldogs won the game. Good teams adjust their tactics and find ways to win. Even bad teams, like Georgia, must do this now and then. The first and most important skill in sports is being available. Staying healthy. Suiting up on game day. Players unable to perform when the lights glow should not be considered championship caliber.

How are we to measure Hardaway at this point? Since he took the job in March 2018, the best skill Hardaway and his players have displayed is swagger. He and they want “all the smoke.” It became a social-media rallying cry, a mantra of sorts for a program emerging from the lost chances of his predecessors, Josh Pastner and Tubby Smith. Pastner led the Tigers to the NCAA tournament four years in a row. But he was skewered for not doing more with the rosters he loaded with prime talent. Smith spent two awkward winters in Memphis, winning more games than he lost, but with junior college transfers leading the way. Penny Hardaway would erase all that disappointment. He would bring “pros” to Memphis, as John Calipari did for a glorious four-year run of late-March basketball. But swagger without results is merely posturing.

There’s one more disturbing variable to this season’s mess (so far): the Larry Brown factor. The Hall of Fame coach joined Hardaway’s staff as somewhat of a Yoda to Hardaway’s Luke Skywalker. He would bring wisdom and the attention to important details — be it development of players or in-game strategy — that should make Hardaway the best Division I coach he could be. Well, if Brown has been a positive factor, it means the Tigers would be worse than 9-7 without him. This is not math Penny Hardaway wants to calculate in quiet moments.

There are 12 regular-season games to play. Maybe DeAndre Williams is the difference, and when (if?) he returns, the Tigers will find a groove. Seven of those games are at FedExForum, where Memphis has secured big wins over 6th-ranked Alabama and Cincinnati. Should the Tigers go 10-2 the rest of the way, would a 19-9 record attract an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament? I wouldn’t bet on it, not with those losses at Tulane and East Carolina (and UCF). Hardaway, Brown and friends must treat the next six weeks like training for the AAC tournament (March 10-13 in Fort Worth). Hardaway has seen an under-performing group rally to win a tournament in Texas (the 2021 NIT). Why not win another one in 2022?

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Sports Tiger Blue

Memphis Tigers: Wreck and Recover

Jalen Duren, Penny Hardaway, and Emoni Bates (Photo by Larry Kuzniewski)

Penny Hardaway was in a dark place, and visibly, during his postgame press conference on December 10th. The basketball coach had just witnessed his Memphis Tigers’ fourth consecutive loss, to Murray State, in what should be a place of comfort, FedExForum. I asked Hardaway if he’d ever felt so low in his basketball life.

“There’s so much going on in our country,” he replied, after shaking his head. “Four losses in a row is devastating, but it’s not life and death. My faith in God; I understand what’s going on. We have to weather a storm. I’ve never been here, but I know I’m a fighter, and I’ll figure it out.” When “life and death” are mentioned — with allusion to the ongoing pandemic — during a discussion about a basketball game . . . it’s a dark place.

Just four days later, the Tigers played 40 minutes of furious basketball and upset the 6th-ranked team in the country, the Alabama Crimson Tide. It was the program’s first win over top-10 competition since March 2014 and the biggest victory in Hardaway’s four seasons as a college coach. 

Four days after the big win, though, with fans already in the stands at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, the Tigers’ much-anticipated clash with Tennessee was cancelled when Landers Nolley and Tyler Harris tested positive for Covid-19. Making matters worse, we learned the majority of Hardaway’s roster had not been vaccinated. By the time the Tigers returned to play on December 29th at Tulane, two starters (Jalen Duren and DeAndre Williams) were sidelined for Covid protocols along with a third (Emoni Bates) with a hand injury. Memphis lost (by a single point) to the Green Wave, a team that will not finish in the top half of the American Athletic Conference standings.

It’s been that kind of season so far for a Tiger team now 1-1 in AAC play after an impressive win at Wichita State on New Year’s Day. A league championship (regular season or tournament) is all but required for a berth in the NCAA tournament. Can a seven-year Big Dance drought be boxed up and left for the history books? Or will the 2021-22 Tigers become chapter eight in an “era” no Memphis fan will celebrate years from now?

Three observations for the Tigers’ two-month push for national relevance:

• Memphis is best when Hardaway squeezes the rotation. Seven players absorbed 91 percent of the minutes in the upset of Alabama. Those seven players: Alex Lomax, Lester Quinones, Landers Nolley, Tyler Harris, Bates, Duren, and Williams. Much was made about the depth of the Memphis roster entering the season. Hardaway has a pair of players — Johnathan Lawson and Sam Onu — redshirting this season that could start for other AAC programs. But a basketball team must play as a unit to perform at optimum capacity. We saw a strong, seven-man unit beat the Crimson Tide by 14 points. To try and force nine or ten players into that “unit” . . . it’s impossible.

• Minutes for Minott. Freshman forward Josh Minott made virtually no impact in the win over Alabama (two points in four minutes of playing time). But in hockey terms, Minott was one of the Tigers’ three stars (along with Duren and Williams) in the victory over Wichita State: 15 points, six rebounds, and a pair of steals in just 19 minutes. Minott gained playing time against the Shockers by virtue of Lomax sitting out with an ankle injury. When Lomax returns, Minott must remain a sixth (or seventh) man. He brings too much for peripheral status.

• No more second-tier surprises. The loss at Tulane and the win at Wichita State might each be considered surprise results, so they’re a wash. But the Tigers cannot afford to lose any more games against lesser competition, and there’s a lot of lesser competition on the AAC schedule. The league favorite, Houston, is down a pair of rotation players. Cincinnati comes to FedExForum this Sunday for a nationally televised showdown. A conference championship is there for the taking. The kind of accomplishment that turns darkness into light.

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Sports Tiger Blue

Tiger Trauma

Jalen Duren (Credit: Larry Kuzniewski)

Penny Hardaway had the table set for a winter of feasting on the hardwood. To take the metaphor further, the University of Memphis basketball coach had a pair of top-five recruits to serve as the meat and potatoes for his 2021-22 team, a healthy number of veterans to provide vitamins and minerals, and for dessert, a Hall of Fame assistant coach, here to sweeten Hardaway’s game-day tactical skills. Year four of the Coach Hardaway Era merely needed to seat the guests.

Then along came Iowa State. And Georgia. And Ole Miss. In a matter of nine days — and not yet officially winter — the Tiger table was toppled.

How bad are things, truly? How close to the panic button should Tiger fans have their fingers? There’s no getting around it: Losses to the Cyclones, Dawgs, and Rebels shouldn’t have happened, not if you look at the respective rosters “on paper.” If Memphis can’t beat teams like Georgia (2-5 and missing its point guard), the Tigers will not be playing on the second weekend of the NCAA tournament … the minimum expectation for this year’s team.

Forget tactics and strategy, though. Here are three intangibles the Memphis Tigers must confront and consider if their season is to be salvaged.

Ego. Every member of the Tigers’ rotation was the star of his high school (or AAU) team. And every member of the Tigers’ rotation is not as good at basketball as he thinks he is right now. Same goes for the head coach, or he wouldn’t be examining film from a three-game losing streak. Among this group of nine or 10 men, who can suppress his ego over the next three months for the better of his team’s mission? Can Emoni Bates and Jalen Duren forget their current NBA stock (it’s falling), and work at being more valuable to the Tigers’ cause when no one besides their teammates and coaches is watching? Can senior DeAndre Williams give up playing time for a freshman (Josh Minott)? Can fundamentals — crisp passing, floor spacing, moving without the ball — take priority over “highlight plays”? Can the city’s most popular basketball presence acknowledge shortcomings long enough to improve the atmosphere surrounding his team? These are big questions for the winter ahead.

Patience. This seems counterintuitive. A quarter of the Tigers’ regular season is history. If a 5-3 team aspires to play in the NCAA tournament, it needs to get better right now. But here’s the uncomfortable catch: Memphis will not play its best basketball of the season this Friday when Murray State visits FedExForum. And that shouldn’t be expected. The assignment from the coaching staff must be to play better basketball than they did in last Saturday’s loss at Ole Miss. Steady improvement will bring wins, not every game, but in several games … if the improvement is steady. And this is where the Tigers face their largest mental challenge. Young men are impatient. Teenagers like Bates and Duren don’t know how to spell the word. Performance equals reward … that’s the world young basketball stars know and understand. But that’s not reality for the Tiger team currently taking the floor. This is a group that must climb a ladder toward success, toward its best group effort. We won’t see it in December, but might we in March?

Resolve. The Tigers’ next three games — Murray State, Alabama, and Tennessee — will be more challenging than the last three. Yikes. Memphis could enter conference play (December 29th at Tulane) with a record at or below .500. The Tigers will not likely reappear in the Top 25 until they reel off a few wins against American Athletic Conference rivals. And this is the key to everything. If Memphis can win the AAC (regular season or tournament), the Tigers will play in the Big Dance. Coaches picked them to finish second (behind Houston). The way they’ve looked of late, a top-three finish would be a surprise. So surprise the world. No one relishes being overlooked — the dis, the snub — more than a Memphis Tiger. It’s part of the culture that sticks to this team, one season or coach after another. Can Penny Hardaway and his band of talented players keep their eyes on the AAC prize? The Tiger basketball program has yet to raise AAC hardware. However painful their last three games may feel, this Memphis team can still make history.