Jon Scheyer played in 144 consecutive games at Duke, the second-longest streak in school history.
Given his background, it’s not difficult to imagine how he felt Saturday when an illness forced him to miss his first game as Duke’s head coach, a road contest at SMU.
“I felt horrible,” he said, presumably referring only partially to the sickness. “I don’t plan on missing a game ever again.”
He will be on the bench Tuesday when Duke welcomes Pitt to Cameron Indoor Stadium.
“I told our team — none of them understood what I was saying — I felt like I was in ‘Interstellar,’” Scheyer said of the 2014 film. “Matthew McConaughey is in the fifth dimension and is looking back at his family. It was a bizarre experience but one where I felt very confident.”
Duke won easily, 89-62, with assistant coach Chris Carrawell running the show.
”I have so much trust in our staff and our players,” said Scheyer, 37. “I felt we were prepared. The game plan was in. To see the togetherness, to see the pride they played with, to see the job that Chris did, I was really proud.”
Scheyer said watching on TV was “an “amazing experience when you separate yourself and take a step back.”
“You’re able just to see things differently because you’re not in a decision-making mode. It allows you just to see the team with where we’re at. It was seamless. I thought our toughness stood out from afar, camaraderie on the bench.”
Junior guard Tyrese Proctor also was sick for the SMU game, but he played 32 minutes and scored 14 points with six rebounds and three assists.
“He had a great maturity to him, was not feeling himself by any means,” Scheyer said.
AP poll update
Duke, Pitt and Clemson are the only teams without a loss in ACC competition and the only ones in the conference getting votes in the Associated Press Top 25 poll. Pitt is 26th, 28 voting points behind No. 25 Utah State and four slots below No. 21 West Virginia, a team the Panthers defeated by 24 in November. Pitt garnered 91 voting points to Clemson’s 19.
Pitt was ranked as high as 17th by AP voter Mitchell Northam of WUNC, a public radio station operated by the University of North Carolina. Northam was one of only two voters to rank the No. 4 Blue Devils No. 2 in the nation.
With a victory against Duke, Pitt will have a chance to crack next week’s poll. The formula for that, coach Jeff Capel said, requires fundamental basketball played at a high level.
“We have to be good at transition defense,” he said Monday on the ACC coaches’ conference call. “They are dynamic in transition, and they do it from missed shots and turnovers. We have to be able to score and, more importantly, to make sure we’re generating good looks and not turning the basketball over.
“We have to have poise and have a toughness and compete for 40 minutes. It’s loud (inside Cameron), and they are one of, if not the best team, in the country and they’re playing at an incredible level right now.”
He said he doesn’t know the reason for his team’s first-half struggles last week in games against California and Stanford. But he does know a slow start against Duke could lead to defeat.
“I could make an excuse and say for the Cal game we hadn’t played since the 21st (of December),” he said. “I can say against Stanford, (the Cardinal’s) matchup zone slowed us down and had us thinking too much. But you guys up here in the Pittsburgh area know I don’t like to make excuses. We just didn’t do it.
“I can tell you we can’t afford to (start slow Tuesday) because if we do, we’ll get blown out of the building pretty quickly.”