DENVER — If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, what the heck does that make Creighton to N.C. State?
Roy Williams could only laugh at the question.
It’s been 11 years since the Bluejays essentially knocked North Carolina out of the NCAA Tournament in Greensboro, a second-round win for the top-seeded Tar Heels that cost them Kendall Marshall and any chance to beat Kansas in the regional final and play for a national title. The recriminations from that game — and what UNC fans believed was Creighton’s alleged dirty play — still linger all these years later.
The 11th-seeded Wolfpack opens the NCAA Tournament Friday with the fifth-seeded Bluejays, and while 2012’s pantomime villains are long, long gone — Grant Gibbs is a G League coach, Ethan Wragge works for a tech company in Denver and Greg Echinque is playing professionally in Japan — Gregg McDermott is still coaching Creighton.
“We were not a physical team that entire year,” McDermott said Thursday. ”That’s not how we played. It’s unfortunate that they had an injury. We’ve certainly had injuries at the end of the season that have impacted our ability to move forward in the tournament.
“I get a few emails every year still from a couple Carolina fans that haven’t forgotten. But Coach Williams and I were great friends then and we’ve remained great friends. I have all the respect in the world for the Carolina program, and we’ll continue to have that.”
McDermott called Williams the day after that game to hash things out, and whatever bad blood there might have been between them was quickly buried. Williams, who so relished the rivalry with the Wolfpack, said he’s fond of McDermott and wants to see the ACC do well, so he won’t take sides Friday.
“Greg’s a good friend,” Williams said. “It was no animosity. Just basketball plays and some things happened during the game. Sometimes as a coach I regretted things my team did. Sometimes you regretted things the other team did. But there’s no animosity between us.”
While Wragge’s foul on Marshall was relatively benign — it was a hard foul, but really the awkward landing caused the problem — it came after a series of incidents that called into question whether Creighton was deliberately trying to injure North Carolina players. John Henson, who was playing with his injured wrist wrapped, picked up a technical foul for objecting to Gibbs hacking him on the wrist several times. Gibbs then turned to the Creighton bench and winked, a gif that lives in Triangle (and college basketball) infamy.
Later, Echinque got away with a forearm to Tyler Zeller’s neck while he was ostensibly trying to box out the North Carolina center, all of which set the stage for anger and recrimination when Wragge fouled Marshall. The media was already in North Carolina’s locker room and talking to the players when the room was cleared so Williams could break the bad news to the team: Marshall needed surgery and might not play in the rest of the tournament.
“Was it excessive? In today’s rules they may have looked at it and called it a flagrant. They may not have,” Williams said. “It was just the way it happened and how important it was to us. You see a play like that made once every other game. It was just the fact he happened to have a broken wrist when it was over, which was the most difficult part of it.”
After blowing the doors off of Duke at Cameron two weeks earlier, Williams told assistants Joe Holladay and Steve Robinson, “If we play like that, we’ll play the last Monday night. And I hope it’s against Kentucky.” Williams said he would come to regret that. With Dexter Strickland already out for the year, Marshall’s injury left little-used freshman Stilman White as North Carolina’s only point guard.
That worked against Ohio but not against second-seeded Kansas, playing a virtual home game in St. Louis, when Marshall wasn’t ready. Four starters departed for the NBA soon after, and UNC didn’t make it back to a regional final until 2016.
But as McDermott attested, that game in Greensboro has never been forgotten, and Wragge endured no end of abuse on social media in the aftermath. McDermott joked that he wouldn’t say where Wragge lives in Denver because of Carolina fans, before it was pointed out that the traveling State fans here might feel differently. “They might be on our side on that one,” McDermott conceded, and Wragge is expected to attend Friday’s game.
It even came up this season when UNC’s Leaky Black fouled State’s Terquavion Smith in midair, sending Smith crashing to the floor in a nasty-looking fall. Smith, despite leaving the court on a stretcher with his arm in an aircast, just ended up being sore. When Smith’s status was still in doubt, and appeared grim, 99.9 The Fan’s Joe Giglio tweeted a picture of Wragge with the words “Googles Leaky Black.”
UNC fans went berserk.
Later, Giglio tweeted that he “miscalculated the venom for Wragge” and was merely trying to draw a comparison between two (potentially) season-changing fouls.
“Our fans really do have a lot of hard feelings, hatred, whatever you want to call it toward the young man,” Williams said. “I don’t have that. I have the feeling that this was not right, or Kendall doesn’t deserve it. Because our team had a chance.”
