NIT championship a tribute to all the Tigers have gone through
Lester Quinones was hugging D.J. Jeffries, Boogie Ellis was hugging Deandre Williams, and Alex Lomax was about to check into a basketball game for the first time in 33 days. They were going to be National Invitation Tournament champions in about 45 seconds, and that meant all of them were going to be champions.
So in came Lomax, a player Penny Hardaway has coached since the sixth grade. A player Hardaway and his late friend, Desmond Merriweather, said years ago would play for Hardaway when he led Memphis to a national championship.
A player still hobbled by an ankle injury but officially in the box score for the biggest Memphis basketball achievement in seven years.
Here, in the midst of pure jubilation, was a good reminder of all this program has been through, all of the pent-up frustration about unfulfilled expectation that led to the unfiltered elation of this moment.
Not just Sunday, when the Tigers (20-8) walloped Mississippi State, 7764, in Frisco, Texas, to capture the school’s second NIT title. Not just this season, when a slow start and an unfortunate COVID-19 pause kept Memphis out of the NCAA Tournament. Not just the three years since Hardaway was hired to return the Tigers to glory, when some of his best-laid plans didn’t work out.
It’s all of that, and then some, because it’s been far too long.
Far too long since Memphis was the talk of the town because of the way it played. Far too long since the Tigers could call themselves champions.
“This is a huge start to where this program really wants to go,” Hardaway declared once the nets had been cut and the commemorative T-shirts had been doled out. “We want to win championships. The NIT is just the start.”
Tigers could be ‘very dangerous’ next season
There will be lots of comparisons drawn to the last time Memphis won a NIT championship in 2002. How that title set up arguably the most successful stretch in program history under John Calipari.
The same could happen this time. Everybody who starred this weekend can come back next season. If they do, “we’ll be very dangerous,” Hardaway said, and that became obvious the longer this postseason went on.
Whether that actually occurs will be discussed plenty over the coming days and weeks.
It is, more so than this title, the biggest offseason storyline if this program is to realize the dreams Hardaway has for it.
“We have so much talent that we kind of get in each other’s way,” he admitted in perhaps a subtle nod to the realities of this situation. “If we could figure it out, we could be scary.”
But first, enjoy this moment
So it’s best, when faced with a hypothetical like this one, to simply enjoy the present.
Enjoy what this team looked like Sunday, bludgeoning a SEC opponent into submission. Enjoy what it looked like for two months now, when only a desperation heave and a few too many missed free throws against Houston stood in the Tigers’ way.
Enjoy how happy everyone looked with that NIT trophy, whether it was those images of Landers Nolley II dancing, or the video of Hardaway having water and Gatorade dumped on him upon entering the locker room.
Enjoy it because of what Memphis had to endure to get this title. This year, last year, Hardaway’s first year, and all seven years since the Tigers were last in the NCAA Tournament.
“We weren’t going to leave here without a championship today,” Hardaway said. “We had to do it for our city. We owed them that this year for the way we started off.”
Think about how these players sacrificed a normal college existence just to play the games in the midst of a pandemic.
Think about Williams, the 24-yearold basketball nomad who became the team’s emotional force after missing the first seven games this season. As usual, he got into foul trouble Sunday. As usual, the Tigers were transformed whenever he was on the court.
Think about Quinones, who came to Memphis as the flashy, sharp-shooting sidekick to Precious Achiuwa, with short shorts and a guitar-strumming 3point celebration that were a bigger part of his brand than anything that happened on the court last season.
And yet on Sunday, he was a gritty 6foot-5 guard grabbing 16 rebounds and
holding Mississippi State star D.J. Stewart to four points on 1-of-10 shooting as the Tigers’ top-ranked defense shined again.
Think about Ellis and Jeffries, two ballyhooed recruits who struggled at times to find their place at Memphis.
But there was Ellis Sunday, knocking down big shot after big shot, just like he has so many times over the past few weeks, ever since Lomax went down and Ellis became the team’s undisputed lead guard.
And there was Jeffries, overcoming a poor first half Sunday to become a key cog in the small-ball lineup Hardaway went to after halftime as Memphis pulled away.
“When that buzzer ended, it was just an amazing feeling,” Quinones said. “It almost brought us all to tears.”
So most of all, think about Hardaway after the biggest accomplishment of his tenure.
Think about how he envisioned this going, when he talked about it with Merriweather all those years ago and when he spoke to the assembled crowd at Laurie-walton Family Basketball Center upon being hired three years ago. How, in his words, these first three years have felt so “unlucky.”
Think about how he turned this season around, and what he must have been thinking about when he got to put Lomax into Sunday’s game.
“Sometimes you can be forgotten when you’re not in the spotlight,” Hardaway said.
He was talking about Lomax, but he might as well have been talking about this entire program.
Memphis basketball has been out of the spotlight for too long. It’s why Sunday won’t soon be forgotten.