From the brink
The huddle that rescued Memphis, Hardaway from disaster
If this was the game where Memphis basketball rescued its season from the brink of disaster — and for the sake of long-suffering Tigers fans everywhere, please let this be the game — Penny Hardaway made it clear Saturday afternoon that the most important moment for him probably isn’t yet the most important one to you.
It wasn’t the David Jones winner Hardaway drew up in the final seconds to propel Memphis past Wichita State 65-63 at Fedexforum. Nor was it the 3pointer by Jahvon Quinerly — his first and only make in 13 field goal attempts — that finally gave the Tigers their first lead with 44 seconds to go.
The moment Hardaway kept coming back to happened in a huddle — the same place that initially triggered the Memphis coach’s ire more than two weeks ago, when this team’s distressing and damaging four-game losing streak began. The huddle, Hardaway emphasized again after snapping that skid in the most dramatic of ways, had been “all kinds of crazy on our team.”
It’s where the chemistry issues he has been alluding to were at their most acute, so much so that there hadn’t been much time lately to deal with anything else during timeouts.
But this huddle — the one Memphis had when it was about to be down by 14 points to Wichita State with less than eight minutes to go — that’s the one Hardaway is going to remember should these Tigers turn this season around, as adamant as they were Saturday.
It was then that Hardaway gave what he later dubbed “my speech to not quit.” He told Memphis it could still win this game. He said they all looked at one another and felt something dif
ferent, something that had gone missing. “They really bonded together in the huddle,” Hardaway said. And then, finally, what he had been telling them, “it happened.”
What happened next gave Memphis relief from the swoon that was threatening to completely consume this oncepromising season. Perhaps it’s only temporary, but that hardly mattered in the immediate aftermath. This team just needed to not lose again, and boy, were those eight minutes — 7:26, to be exact — a revelation.
Hardaway stuck with the same lineup — Quinerly, Jones, forward Jaykwon Walton and big men Nick Jourdain and Nae’qwan Tomlin — and they outscored Wichita State by 15 points. They allowed just three field goals and went 8 of 10 from the field in those final eight minutes. Jones caught a heater, scoring 16 of his 26 points during the sequence. Six of the Tigers’ final eight field goals were assisted.
It was everything Hardaway wanted, and everything that had vanished.
“You saw a top-10 team in the country in the last eight minutes,” he said.
And though the preceding 32 minutes were as dicey and demoralizing as the previous four games had been, that was enough for this day. This team just needed to get out of its slump, and that’s what this escape represented to Hardaway.
The pressure was mounting. You could see the tension in how Memphis played the majority of the game. You could hear it when Hardaway opened his postgame news conference with a two-minute statement about the toll these losses and the criticism take on him, how he wants this program to bring joy to the city, and his belief that he was called by God to take on this job almost six years ago. The Tigers’ NCAA Tournament hopes were in danger of falling off a cliff. Everybody knew it.
They’re still in jeopardy, by the way. Barely beating one of the worst teams in the American Athletic Conference this year at home — a team Memphis destroyed on the road right before losing four-straight — is not going to help much when all of those bracketologists make their updates after the weekend.
But the hope is by avoiding another bad loss that would have moved this team totally off the March Madness radar — and into conversations nobody wanted to have so soon after this program seemed on the cusp of something special — Memphis figured out who it has to be again in time to salvage this.
The same coach who frustratingly used 12 players, featured 12 different lineups and substituted 21 times before halftime is also the same coach who went with just eight players, five different lineups and nine substitutions in the second half, before drawing up a beautifully designed and wellexecuted play to free Jones for a clean look at his final shot.
This team and this coach have flaws. They’re obvious now. But there is a good team and a good coach underneath all of that. These Tigers proved it in nonconference play. Hardaway proved it each of the past two years, when his teams peaked in March. They emerged in unison, for the first time in too long, during those last eight minutes, starting with a huddle they hopefully won’t soon forget.
“You can look in somebody’s eye when things aren’t going well and see where their head’s at,” Quinerly said, “and today I looked at all my teammates and I could tell nobody had given up.”
If this game means anything, it’s that nobody around here should be giving up yet, either.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on X: @mgiannotto