For Penny’s 100th win, Memphis gives best gifts it can
The best 3-point shooting team in the conference was suddenly hitting 3pointers, Landers Nolley II was letting everyone on the Memphis bench know about every one of them, and the score was suddenly tied.
This was the moment when the Tigers could have wilted, when the uneven group that emerged from the holiday break maybe would have wilted.
But for Penny Hardaway’s 100th win at Memphis (unofficially), his players delivered perhaps the best gifts it could.
They gave him a 75-68 victory at Cincinnati, a place and a team that tormented Hardaway more than any other during his playing career at Memphis.
They gave him a closing stretch led by Kendric Davis and Deandre Williams that he should bottle up and take with him for these final 12 games of the regular season.
They gave him back, most importantly of all, the poised and polished team he thought he had when non conference play ended, the one that might be finding its stride again to make a run after a rough couple weeks.
“This was a pressure win,” Hardaway said. “We needed this win.”
They needed, as usual, Davis and Williams. Or Williams and Davis. The headliner changes from game-to-game now.
Coming off the best performance of his Memphis career against Wichita State three days earlier, Williams responded with another 26-point, 8-rebound gem. He also avoided fouling out despite a couple bogus calls, which means the Tigers are now 12-1 this season when he finishes the game.
It’s all the more impressive because Hardaway used Williams almost exclusively as a small-ball center, part of a plan to limit Cincinnati’s prolific outside shooting. It, in essence, baited Cincinnati into running its offense through 6foot-11 big man Viktor Lakhin. Though Lakhin finished with a career-best 22 points, the trade off came when the Bearcats hit only 6 of their 24-pointers.
But their lone barrage from beyond the arc to start the second half
eventually tied the score at 50 with 12 minutes left. So up stepped Davis, like he has so many times already this season, scoring six points in a row just like that.
His teammates, meanwhile, allowed Cincinnati to score only 11 points over the next 10 minutes of action, and hit 13 of their 14 free throws to seal a thirdstraight win.
Davis, by the way, also sent a message to Nolley in the game’s opening minutes. The two transfers — Davis came to Memphis from SMU and Nolley came to Cincinnati from Memphis – were called for double technicals after jawing at one another. Davis then promptly drew a charge on Nolley that forced him to the bench with two fouls.
“Landers is a prideful guy. He’s probably saying this is still his team and KD was like, ‘No, this is my team now. I’m here.’ ” Hardaway said, describing the sequence after the game. “He set the tone for the rest of the team.”
It was another form of vindication for Hardaway after an offseason in which he jettisoned Nolley and Memphis native Tyler Harris (now at USF) for chemistry reasons he has declined to fully explain. Whenever this Memphis team has struggled, and particularly because it’s one of the worst in the country at making 3-pointers, there are critics who have wondered why Hardaway chose the route he’s on at the moment.
“Any time you play against your old players,” Hardaway added, “you don’t want them to beat you so they can say I told you so.”
So now these Tigers are back within striking distance of Houston in the American Athletic Conference standings, with perhaps a little more breathing room along the bubble because of their best road win of the season Sunday. It’s where they were before those losses at Tulane and UCF and those come-from-behind wins over USF, ECU and Temple.
It’s also a fitting way for Hardaway to unofficially register win No. 100.
The university can’t recognize the accomplishment yet because Memphis was forced to vacate one win as part of its IARP ruling related to James Wiseman’s eligibility situation.
But to see Memphis emerge Sunday from the rockiness of this January storm as the team it was intended to be, a team with enough toughness and grit to overcome its apparent flaws, is really the story of Hardaway’s tenure as coach.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto