Road to Duke
Minnesota doesn't produce many five-star basketball recruits. The state's basketball tradition runs through small-town gyms and frozen parking lots, not AAU showcases and national TV. So when Matthew Hurt averaged 36.8 points and 12.4 rebounds per game as a senior at John Marshall High School in Rochester, finished as the all-time leading scorer in Minnesota history with 3,819 career points, and was named Mr. Basketball, the whole state noticed — and then watched him leave for Durham.
Born on April 20, 2000, Hurt grew up in Rochester with basketball woven into the family fabric. His older brother Michael played at the University of Minnesota. His father Richard coached his D1 Minnesota AAU team. As a junior, he averaged 33.9 points, 15.1 rebounds, 3.6 assists, and 4.3 blocks — numbers so absurd they would be implausible in a video game, let alone a Minnesota high school gym. He was named a McDonald's All-American and played in the Nike Hoop Summit.
He chose Duke over North Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas — four blue bloods fighting over a 6-foot-9 stretch four from the Midwest with a jump shot that scouts compared to a catapult. "Coach K thinks I'm one of the best shooters in the class," Hurt told the Minneapolis Star Tribune when he committed. His father was more measured: "He wants to be a one-and-done, but he also wants to be in the NBA for a long time. If that means he stays for a year, two years, three years, whatever it is, we want him prepared." That pragmatism would prove prophetic.
At Duke
Hurt's freshman season in 2019-20 was solid but unspectacular — the kind of year that separates the immediate NBA prospects from the ones who need more time. He averaged 9.7 points on .487 shooting with a .393 three-point percentage across 31 games, starting 22. He scored 11 points with three threes in his debut against Kansas in the Champions Classic. He had a 20-point, 8-rebound game against Winthrop. But Vernon Carey Jr. (17.8 ppg) and Tre Jones (16.2 ppg) were the stars, and Hurt was the third option on a team that went 25-6 before COVID canceled the NCAA Tournament.
Then the pandemic hit — and it became the best thing that ever happened to Matthew Hurt's career. He went home to Rochester, and "Team Hurt" went to work. His brother Michael drove down from Minneapolis every day. His father opened the John Marshall gym and weight room. A Chicago-based trainer named Jeff Pagliocca ran workouts over Zoom that Michael and Richard translated into live drills. For five months, six days a week, Matthew trained with his family in an empty high school gym in southern Minnesota while the rest of the world was locked down.
Coach K called Richard Hurt that Easter and laid out exactly what Matthew needed: get stronger, improve his movement with and without the ball, become the player who gets the ball when the shot clock is running down. "Matthew was very motivated and very driven about wanting to get better," Michael told the Rochester Post-Bulletin. "We established what his end goals should be — that he needed to be a guy who when the shot clock was running down, could create his shot. Now, he can get his shot off against anyone."
The transformation was immediate and dramatic. As a sophomore in 2020-21, Hurt led the ACC in scoring at 18.3 points per game — nearly doubling his freshman average. His field goal percentage jumped from .487 to .556. His three-point accuracy rose from .393 to .444. He scored 20 or more points ten times. He went 13-of-15 from two-point range against Louisville for 37 points — a career high. He recorded three double-doubles. He was named All-ACC First Team, ACC Most Improved Player, and USBWA District 3 Player of the Year. He left Duke ranked third on the program's all-time career three-point percentage list at .421.
But the team around him crumbled. The 2020-21 Blue Devils went 13-11 — Coach K's worst season — and their year ended not with a loss but with a COVID positive test that forced them to withdraw from the ACC Tournament. Jalen Johnson had opted out mid-season. The roster was thin. Hurt was the best player on the worst Duke team in four decades, and the question was whether NBA scouts would see a star on a bad team or a product of volume on a depleted roster.
After Duke
The answer came on draft night: silence. Matthew Hurt went undrafted in 2021 — the ACC's leading scorer, a first-team All-ACC selection, a McDonald's All-American, Minnesota's all-time leading scorer, and nobody called his name across two rounds.
What followed was a three-year odyssey through the margins of professional basketball. He signed a two-way contract with the Houston Rockets, played Summer League, and was waived before training camp. He signed with the Memphis Grizzlies; waived two days later. He joined the Memphis Hustle in the G League and was released midseason. He played Summer League for the Milwaukee Bucks. He had a preseason stint with the Grizzlies, got waived again, rejoined the Hustle. The cycle repeated — sign, waive, reassign, release — for three full seasons.
But in the G League, he was a monster. In 2023-24, Hurt averaged 19.6 points and 7.1 rebounds on .507/.400/.786 shooting for the Hustle — numbers that finally earned him two 10-day contracts with the Grizzlies. He appeared in 8 NBA games in January and February 2024, averaging 4.0 points in 14 minutes. It was modest, but it was real — eight NBA games for a player everyone had written off three years earlier.
Memphis didn't re-sign him. So Hurt went global. He signed with the South East Melbourne Phoenix in Australia's NBL for the 2024-25 season and exploded: 20.1 points, 7.4 rebounds, 1.3 assists per game. He was selected to the NBL All-Five — the league's all-star team. The shot that Coach K called one of the best in the class was dropping from everywhere, just on a different continent.
Where Is He Now
In the summer of 2025, Hurt moved to Italy and signed with Trapani Shark in Serie A — the top Italian league. He averaged 12.5 points in the Basketball Champions League and 8.8 points in domestic play before transferring mid-season to Cedevita Olimpija in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he now plays in the ABA League and EuroCup. Four countries in two years: America, Australia, Italy, Slovenia.
"I'm really excited to have joined Cedevita Olimpija," Hurt said upon signing. "I have heard great things about the team and the city." The sports director called him a player with "great offensive potential" who is "distinguished by his shooting from distance, his feel for rebounding, and his basketball intelligence."
The number that defines Matthew Hurt's career isn't 18.3 — his scoring average on Duke's worst team. It isn't 3,819 — his Minnesota state scoring record. It's zero — the number of times his name was called on draft night. He led the ACC in scoring and went undrafted. He averaged 20 points in the G League and couldn't stick on an NBA roster. He was an All-Star in Australia and still had to keep moving.
But he keeps playing. Rochester to Durham to Houston to Memphis to Milwaukee back to Memphis to Melbourne to Trapani to Ljubljana. The kid who trained with his brother in an empty gym during COVID, who doubled his scoring average because Coach K called his dad on Easter, is still putting the ball through the hoop — 3,819 points in Minnesota, 744 at Duke, and counting everywhere else. The shot never stopped falling. The NBA just never gave him enough minutes to prove it.