No. 18 Memphis wants to get back on track, and fixing defensive snags is bound to be one way to do it.
The Tigers will play Sunday afternoon at last-place Charlotte in an American Athletic Conference game after falling 88-81 at Temple on Thursday. Memphis gave up 52 second-half points, and the outcome snapped the team’s four-game winning streak.
“No worry yet. I think the players will bounce back from this,” Memphis coach Penny Hardaway said. “… I’m not going to panic.”
Memphis (13-4, 3-1) became the last team in the AAC to suffer a conference defeat this season.
“We’re still in control of our own destiny,” Hardaway said.
Charlotte (7-11, 0-5), which is mired in a six-game losing streak, is the only team without an AAC victory this season. The latest setback came Tuesday, 68-59 at Wichita State.
“You got to have the discipline and toughness to make the right plays over a 40-minute period of time,” Charlotte coach Aaron Fearne said.
So that makes the task against Memphis perhaps more daunting for the 49ers.
“Right now, (the Tigers) are up there as the best there is, and they’ve beaten some really good teams,” Fearne said. “We’re going to have to be phenomenal. We’re going to have to, obviously, have fantastic support from our fan base, and community, and help us get through the patch.”
Memphis guard PJ Haggerty is the AAC’s leading scorer at an average of 22.3 points per game.
With the unbeaten mark in league play off the board, it’s time for the Tigers to refocus. In the Temple game, it was the most points allowed by Memphis since November.
“When our offense wasn’t working, we weren’t caring about the other end,” Hardaway said.
Charlotte’s averages of 70.5 points per game ranks third-to-last in the AAC.
Nik Graves leads the 49ers with 16.6 points per game, reaching double figures in all except one game. He had a team-high 13 points at Wichita State. But there have been only five games when Graves hasn’t connected on a 3-point shot, with two of those across the last three games. He went 0-for-4 from long range on Tuesday.
Cutting down on turnovers would help Charlotte, and Giancarlo Rosado might be the key to getting the offense in a good flow.
“Our offense is most effective when he moves the ball,” Fearne said. “He moved the ball way better (vs. Wichita State) and got guys moving around.”
The 49ers will have to be up to the task on the boards. The team has three starters at 6-foot-3, so that makes dealing with rebounding a challenge at times, and that’s reflected in a league-worst minus-3.6 rebounding margin per game.
Charlotte has ended with a rebounding deficit in its last four games, while five times this season it has been on the wrong side of a double-digit rebounding gap.
The hope for the 49ers is that they’ve grown during some of the tough times the past few weeks.
“We’ll see if it makes us tougher,” Fearne said. “That’s what will get revealed.”
–Field Level Media
