Duke basketball coaches forced Mason Gillis to remain home instead of traveling

The Duke basketball team traveled to Syracuse with one less body on the plane as the program announced shortly before tipoff that forward Mason Gillis would not play due to an illness.

Gillis remained home in Durham while he watched his team land a 29-point victory over the Orange, but it wasn’t that easy of a choice to not be with his teammates.

“Mason is as tough as it gets, as competitive as it gets,” Jon Scheyer said after the 83-54 victory. “For him not to be on this trip, he's really sick. Otherwise, he'd be here.”

After a slow start to his Duke career after transferring from Purdue, Gillis has played well recently, averaging 6.4 points per game in his last five contests while shooting 8-of-14 from 3-point range over that stretch.

He contributed 11 key points in Duke’s second half comeback victory over Wake Forest last week.

“He was trying to get on the plane, and we told him, ‘There’s no way’. We'll see when we get back. We'll see how he is [Thursday],” Scheyer added. “But if he's not here, that means he's really under the weather, not feeling well.”

In Gillis’ absence, freshman forward Isaiah Evans saw more time on the court and delivered with 10 points, three rebounds, and four assists on 3-of-6 shooting, which included one of his best dunks of the season to put the exclamation point on the victory in the final minutes.

It’s not the first time Duke didn’t have a member of the team travel for a road game after Jon Scheyer remained in Durham for the Blue Devils’ matchup against SMU in Texas due to an illness, a game in which he watched his team win by 27 points.

Duke is hopeful to have Mason Gillis available for its major showdown on Saturday evening (6:30 p.m. ET, ESPN) on the road against Clemson, who is looking for a signature victory to bolster its NCAA Tournament resume.