Penny Hardaway’s most important offseason of his coaching career
Penny Hardaway kept saying he didn’t know. Over and over again once this Memphis basketball season came to an abrupt end Thursday.
He didn’t know why this team fell apart, or why this batch of transfers didn’t respond to him the way his previous teams did. He didn’t know why, in what appears to be their final game together, these Tigers “played like we had another game tomorrow,” Hardaway said after the Tigers’ disastrous second-round exit from the American Athletic Conference tournament. But he knew.
He has to know, or else he’s likely to endure more weeks like this one he just had – one that started with him proclaiming to be doing a great job as coach and ended with all the proof anyone needed to know things are not great for his program, or for him, right now.
For the first time in 50 years, a Memphis team ranked in the top 10 of the national polls in the middle of January won’t play in the NCAA tournament. For the first time since the Tic Price era, Memphis (22-10) didn’t even make it to the quarterfinals of its conference tournament. For the first time in his life, Hardaway is dividing this city rather than unifying it.
That’s the underlying story here, the one everybody who celebrated Hardaway’s hiring feared when Memphis was forced to turn to an icon to save this civic institution from irrelevance. That’s why the way this season collapsed, to the point that the Tigers’ only hope of a positive Selection Sunday was to win the AAC tournament as a No. 5 seed, was so painful. That’s why Hardaway is about to embark upon the most important offseason of his tenure as the coach at Memphis.
“It just has to be different for me next year,” Hardaway acknowledged. “Obviously this hurts because I wanted to do well for the team, for the school and the city. This does not sit well with me because it just wasn’t a representation of … who we should be.”
Six years into this bold move, what the Tigers should be under Hardaway and what they are has reached a critical juncture. This has been neither a failure nor an overwhelming success, but being somewhere in between is really nowhere in college basketball. Though Hardaway’s job isn’t on the line, the trajectory of the program – and the belief that he’s the one to lead Memphis past the first weekend of the NCAA tournament again – hang in the balance.
The warning signs of a coach in trouble are no longer simply determined by wins and losses. Today, they revolve around how much money that coach can generate for players in the transfer portal, players currently on the roster, and the mostly unregulated world that turned name, image and likeness rights into another version of pay-for-play.
We’ll know soon, as Hardaway once again has to replenish much of his roster, just how much damage was done by this season. But at the moment, it’s most telling that when Hardaway emphatically shot down the notion of Memphis accepting an invite to the NIT, most didn’t even complain. Be it Hardaway, or his players, or the fans – few wanted to see this team play another game.
It’s a precursor to apathy, the very scourge that led Memphis to tap Hardaway for this position.
“I am definitely a man on fire from this season,” he said. “I’ve learned so much.”
Whether his actions match those words will be crucial moving forward.
Last year, you’ll remember, Hardaway told us that if he was going to rely on the transfer portal, he needed to have his team in place by June. He then had a roster that was still taking shape at the end of December, taking some risks (perhaps out of necessity) on players who seemingly came and went – or never came to campus at all – throughout the offseason and even in the midst of conference play.
But if you listened carefully Thursday, amidst the different versions of “I don’t know” and Hardaway’s usual soundbites about how hard he worked and how prepared he had his players that now fall on deaf ears, what he decided went wrong and how he will fix it emerged in bits and pieces.
Maybe the biggest problem, Hardaway reiterated, was the season-ending injury to Caleb Mills. It left Memphis without a vocal leader and its best perimeter defender. It compounded that this team was his first not built around its defense, the first in which he couldn’t switch up schemes and pressure the ball effectively the way he did in previous seasons.
“I veered away from that this year to get talent,” Hardaway said.
He called himself a players’ coach again, but this time he talked about it as a potential weakness. How he let stuff slide with this group that he shouldn’t have.
He offered a hint as to why, at least from the outside looking in, it seems his program is too often held back by self-inflicted problems stemming from inconsistent leadership.
“What I would change?” Hardaway said. “Just the punishment of the things that were going on would change. That’s going to get better with me moving forward.”
That’s a start.
That’s a coach taking some accountability for how badly this ended. That’s an indication Hardaway will adjust his approach to roster building and team building – that even if he’s not going to change how he coaches the game, he will at least seek players better suited for the way he coaches. That’s a reminder, however, of the tricky spot Memphis now finds itself, in which one of its legends has to convince fans to put their faith in him again.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on X: @mgiannotto