Penny Hardaway has been irritated by a lot of things lately.

The sixth-year Memphis basketball coach offloaded several of those peeves — highlighted by the public denouncement that some players have quit on the team — after Sunday’s 106-79 train wreck at SMU.

But there’s one thing that annoys Hardaway above all else: when people wonder how the Tigers got to this point. How Memphis (18-8, 7-6 AAC) went from a top-15 team and an NCAA tournament shoo-in last month to a shell of itself in a matter of weeks.

The notion that the Tigers somehow inexplicably fell off a cliff grates on Hardaway.

“See, what you guys keep trying to do, you keep trying to put two teams against each other,” he said during his postgame interview Sunday with Memphis reporters outside the visitors' locker room at Moody Coliseum in Dallas. “The team that won 10 in a row is totally different from this team. This is not the same team. This team is 7-6. The other team was (11-2). This is not the same team.

“It’s a totally different team. It’s not the same team. That’s what’s frustrating me the most, because I’m trying to get this team to play on the level that the other team was, and I have not been able to find a way to do it.”

The tale of two Tigers teams began with a 5-0 start. After being blown out by Villanova and losing a close game at Ole Miss — both currently projected to be NCAA tournament teams — Memphis got hot, winning 10 consecutive games. The first four were road wins over VCU and Texas A&M, followed by home wins over Clemson and Virginia. Three of those four teams are also part of the projected NCAA tournament field, while the other (VCU) is in the mix for the Atlantic 10 championship.

That’s when things began to change. Hardaway added Nae’Qwan Tomlin, a midseason transfer from Kansas State, before the team hosted Vanderbilt on Dec. 23. On Jan. 4, guard Caleb Mills went down with a season-ending knee injury.

A week later, center Jordan Brown (who left the team after the Ole Miss loss for reasons that still haven’t been fully explained) attempted to rejoin the Tigers. Brown’s efforts were initially rebuffed following a players-only meeting. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and Brown officially returned ahead of the Tigers’ Jan. 21 loss at Tulane.

PENNY HARDAWAY: Coach rips some Memphis basketball players, questions their commitment to team

That sequence of events, coupled with the season-long air of discontent from multiple unnamed players, is exactly why Memphis finds itself spiraling out of control, according to Hardaway. But in his mind, Mills’ injury has been the most difficult bump in the road to overcome.

“We got on a really good winning streak because we had Caleb Mills, who is a really good player,” Hardaway said. “Playing with the other smalls, it made us very difficult to guard, because David Jones was always at the 4.”

Five games remain in the regular season, starting with Charlotte (17-8, 11-2) on Wednesday (7 p.m., ESPN+) at FedExForum. But the Tigers likely will have to win the AAC Tournament for an NCAA Tournament berth. If that happens, it will be because the players cared enough to hold their teammates accountable.

“We haven’t had a leader to emerge yet, because everybody’s scared to hurt each other’s feelings,” Hardaway said. “But I think, after today, it’s going to be some feelings hurt. At halftime, it was things they haven’t said all year. So it’s letting me know that they’re starting to (say), ‘Hey, we’ve gotta just fight.’ ”

Reach sports writer Jason Munz at jason.munz@commercialappeal.com or follow him @munzly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: How Penny Hardaway makes sense of Memphis basketball's implosion