Road to Duke
DJ Steward went 10-for-10 from the field in a state championship game as a high school freshman. Not 10-for-15. Not a strong shooting night. Perfect — every shot he took went in, in the biggest game of the season, at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois. His team lost anyway. But the performance announced something to the Chicago basketball world: this kid was different.
Born on October 2, 2001, in Chicago, Steward grew up in Oak Park with basketball in his blood and music in his name. His father, Danny Boy Steward, was a recording artist on Death Row Records — Suge Knight's legendary label — in the 1990s. His stepfather, Tyrone Hill, played 12 seasons in the NBA. DJ was named after his father, but he chose his stepfather's profession.
After two years at Fenwick, Steward transferred to Whitney Young High School on Chicago's West Side — the same school that had produced Jahlil Okafor, who won a national championship at Duke in 2015. The pipeline was already built. At Whitney Young, Steward averaged 22.5 points, 4.1 rebounds, and 3.5 assists as a senior and was named a McDonald's All-American. On the Nike EYBL circuit the summer before, he had averaged 24.1 points while shooting 41% from three. In the Highland Shootout, he dropped 40 points including the game-tying bucket in a two-point win.
When Coach K and three assistant coaches — including Jon Scheyer — showed up at Whitney Young's first open gym of the fall, the recruitment was effectively over. Steward committed to Duke on September 18, 2019, becoming the biggest Chicago basketball recruit since Jalen Brunson left Stevenson for Villanova in 2015. NBC Sports Chicago called him "Chicago's biggest high school star since Jalen Brunson." He chose Duke over Illinois, Louisville, North Carolina, and Texas. The 247Sports scouting report compared him to Reggie Jackson: "A bit of an undersized scoring guard who can really shoot it." He was ranked the #1 player in Illinois and #23 nationally — and he arrived in Durham carrying the weight of a city that hadn't sent a player to Duke since Okafor five years earlier.
At Duke
Steward arrived in Durham for the strangest season in Duke basketball history. COVID-19 had emptied Cameron Indoor Stadium. The non-conference schedule was gutted. The Blue Devils would play just 24 games — the fewest since 1994-95 — and finish 13-11, Coach K's worst record in four decades.
None of that was Steward's fault. He was electric from his first game. Coming off the bench against Coppin State in his debut, he scored 24 points on 10-of-18 shooting with 4 threes and 9 rebounds — the fourth-most points by a Duke freshman in a debut game and the most ever off the bench. He was named ACC Freshman of the Week twice. Against Wake Forest in January, he went for 26 points and 6 rebounds. Against Illinois in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge, he hit 3-of-5 from three for 13 points against his home-state school. He finished with a career-high 7 assists against Syracuse.
For the season, Steward averaged 13.0 points — second on the team behind Matthew Hurt's 18.3 — with 3.9 rebounds and 2.4 assists on .426 shooting and .341 from three. He shot .811 from the free throw line. He was named to the ACC All-Freshman Team, leading all conference freshmen in scoring. He played 30.7 minutes per game as a starter — trusted with the ball in crunch time on a team that desperately needed someone who could create his own shot.
The scouting report on Steward was clear: shooting guard skills in a point guard's body. At 6-foot-2, 163 pounds, he had the scoring instincts of a two-guard but would need to run an offense at the next level. Against Wake Forest a second time, he went for 21 points on 8-of-15 shooting with 6 rebounds and 2 blocks in a career-high 39 minutes. At North Carolina, he scored 16 on 6-of-11 shooting. In the ACC Tournament against Boston College, he hit 7-of-14 for 17 points. He was a volume scorer who was at his best when the game was tight and the defense was set — which, on a 13-11 team, was most of the time.
He declared for the NBA Draft after one season. Like Hurt, he went undrafted — the two best players on Duke's worst team, and neither heard their name called.
After Duke
What followed was a four-year journey through every level of professional basketball below the NBA. Steward signed an Exhibit 10 contract with the Sacramento Kings after Summer League. He was waived and joined the Stockton Kings in the G League. He played for the Vancouver Bandits in the Canadian Elite Basketball League. He played Summer League for the Philadelphia 76ers. He signed with the Boston Celtics in October 2023 and was waived twelve days later. He joined the Maine Celtics in the G League.
Through it all, he could score. In 90 G League games across multiple stints, Steward averaged 15.5 points, 3.9 rebounds, and 4.1 assists on .463/.363/.820 shooting — numbers that proved he belonged somewhere. In July 2024, the Chicago Bulls signed him to a two-way contract — a homecoming for the kid from Oak Park. But he spent the entire time with the Windy City Bulls in the G League and was waived on December 28 without playing an NBA game. He joined the Memphis Hustle in January 2025 — the same G League team where his former Duke teammate Matthew Hurt had spent three seasons.
In the summer of 2025, Steward signed with Dolomiti Energia Trento in Italy's Serie A — the same league Hurt had joined a year earlier. Two Duke teammates from the 13-11 season, both undrafted, both bouncing through G Leagues and summer leagues for years, both ending up in Italy. The parallel was almost too perfect.
Where Is He Now
DJ Steward is playing professional basketball in Trento, Italy, for a team competing in both Serie A and the EuroCup. He's 24 years old and still chasing the NBA career that a 10-for-10 state championship game and a 24-point Duke debut promised. The scoring has never been the problem. At every level — high school, AAU, college, G League, Canada, Italy — he puts the ball in the basket. The NBA just never found a permanent spot for a 6-foot-2 scoring guard in a league that wants its small guards to be distributors first.
His father made records on Death Row. His stepfather made a career in the NBA. DJ Steward is making his own way — through Sacramento and Stockton and Vancouver and Boston and Maine and Chicago and Memphis and now Trento. He came out of the same Whitney Young program as Jahlil Okafor, played on the same Duke team as Matthew Hurt, went undrafted on the same night, and ended up in the same Italian league years later.
The 2020-21 Duke team was defined by what went wrong: COVID, Jalen Johnson opting out, a 13-11 record, no tournament. But it also produced two scorers — Hurt and Steward — who have spent the years since proving that they can play at the highest levels of professional basketball, even if the NBA won't let them stay. Steward scored 24 points in his Duke debut. He's been scoring ever since. The stage keeps changing. The shot doesn't.
Somewhere in Trento, a kid from Oak Park who went 10-for-10 as a freshman, whose father made music for Death Row and whose stepfather made buckets in the NBA, is doing what he's always done — putting the ball through the hoop, in whatever gym will have him, in whatever country will let him play. The NBA door opened for his stepfather. For DJ Steward, every other door in professional basketball has opened instead.