Penny Hardaway Couldn't Sound More Soft As Memphis' Season Officially Goes Up In Flames
Penny's Tigers are cooked.
The Memphis Tigers are not a good basketball team. The 12-12 record the team carried into their road trip to Utah State on Saturday night shows that the Tigers are the definition of average, but after their 99-75 loss, Penny Hardaway's message all but proves that he, along with his team, is officially done.
The contest was essentially over at halftime with Memphis trailing by 14 points given that the Tigers have won just two true road games all season. Despite the fact that Memphis played its way into a 76-55 hole with 10 minutes left in the contest, Hardaway took exception to the Aggies ‘running the score up’ instead of his team showing any ounce of fight.
Hardaway didn't appreciate the fact that Utah State scored two buckets in the final 30 seconds of the game. That last bucket was a ferocious windmill dunk by MJ Collins Jr. that put the exclamation point of all exclamation points on the game.
Hardaway was then seen telling Collins, "don't do that, bro" as the team shook hands after the game.
Hardaway personally telling Collins that he shouldn't be hammering home windmill dunks in a game that had long been over is fair; plenty of coaches would wait to voice those complaints through the media.
However, the message Hardaway shared with the radio broadcast after the contest was weak.
"You can’t do what they did. You can’t keep scoring the ball," Hardaway said. "We came out here to play this game. You gotta have more class than that. It ain’t even just that last one. It was the rest of them. You just gotta have some type of class, seriously."
That sounds like something a high school coach would say, not a former four-time NBA All-Star turned head coach of a team that has been to the NCAA Tournament three of the last four years.
Sure, Memphis had to make the trek out ot Logan, Utah to play a game, but to complain about that fact makes it sound as if he himself gave his own guys very little chance to truly compete in the game.
That's not the type of message you want to portray as the head coach of Memphis while discussing a game against Utah State.