It was supposed to be a moment of excitement, but Dejounte Murray felt pain and frustration. It was the summer of 2024 and the Hawks had traded him to the Pelicans, a promising team in which he would join Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram. The 29-year-old, 6-foot-1 guard might be able to regain the form that made him an All-Star in 2022 while playing for the Spurs. On the court, the outlook was hopeful. Off it, it was bleak.
A week before the season began, his mother suffered a stroke. In the first game of the season, Dejounte broke his left hand and missed 17 games. Then his cousin was killed. Shortly afterwards, his uncle overdosed. And on January 31, 2025, in a game against the Celtics, he ruptured the Achilles tendon in his right leg. Goodbye to that season and part of the next. A succession of misfortunes in a very short time that would turn anyone’s life upside down.
Murray’s experience was similar. “It was literally the worst three months of my professional career. I could never focus on basketball,” Murray said in an article in The Athletic coinciding with his return to the court almost 13 months later. But those were not the first blows that life had dealt him. In fact, he was used to receiving them since he was a child.
“I’ve been overcoming obstacles since I was five years old. I could never lead a normal life. And people will never understand that. From the age of seven or eight there was nothing normal about the things around me,” he says. That environment was a broken home in South End, one of the worst neighborhoods in Seattle, surrounded by crime, guns and drugs. And everything that was known about him had a negative impact on the NBA draft, in which he was selected 29th in 2016
An 11-year-old criminal
His mother was in and out of jail and his grandmother was his adult role model. Constant changes of home and substandard housing forced him to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag. As a child, he was already a drug specialist. He was arrested for armed robbery. He was only 11 years old. After a while, he served time in a juvenile detention center. Now he doesn’t forget all that and occasionally calls friends and family who are in prison.
A ruptured Achilles tendon seems trivial compared to that life. So it wasn’t going to stop him. “I carry a lot of weight on my shoulders. I carry it alone. I get through it. I’m someone who keeps going. Life goes on and you either stay down or you get up. I’ll get up every time,” he says with conviction. For now, he has already returned to the court, playing 25 minutes and scoring 13 points in a recent Pelicans victory over the Warriors (113-109).
“I want to be able to show the world that you can overcome any obstacle in life and come out victorious, even better than ever,” says Murray, whose definition of success is far from conventional. “You woke up today, you have the opportunity to do something great, whatever it is you do. You don’t have to become rich and famous. It could be getting ahead, having a steady job, a roof over your head… Millions of dollars and mansions are not real, really. Success is all those little things that have nothing to do with the NBA or basketball.”