The Vegas Golden Knights’ 2024 Draft class was never going to be plentiful. After trading away their second-, third-, fourth-, fifth- and seventh-round picks, the club needed to acquire a third-rounder in the Logan Thompson deal just to muster four draft picks. To ensure they added young skill to the pipeline with limited resources and without a first-round pick in the next two drafts, the front office had to take some ambitious risks.
Case in point, Trevor Connelly.
The Golden Knights took Connelly with the No. 19 pick in the first round, betting big on a player with high-end talent but some red flags related to maturity issues. A star with the United States Hockey League’s (USHL) Tri-City Storm, the 18-year-old was viewed as a top-10 prospect by some scouts based on his on-ice abilities. However, a string of incidents – both on and off the ice – raised several character questions about the California native that reportedly scared many NHL executives away.
“He’s probably the second-best player after Mack Celebrini in the U.S.,” one scout told The Hockey News. “Uber-talented, makes everyone else on the ice better, very smart, fast, good skill, high IQ, good vision. He checks all the boxes. It’s going to be one of those deals where you have to kick it up the ladder and your manager is going to have to make a decision. All we can do is vet the kid. He’s a top-10 talent.”
Connelly’s Star Potential
Connelly can be an offensive difference-maker. The winger finished second in USHL scoring last season, with 31 goals and 78 points in 52 games. His 1.5 point-per-game average was second league-wide behind 2025 top prospect James Hagens (1.808).
Connelly, who has committed to Providence College, projects as a future top-six forward. He makes up for his small stature (6 feet, 156 pounds) with elite speed, high-level puck handling and a deadly shot. With a tantalizing upside, he’s drawn comparisons to Matthew Barzal. He still needs to work on his defensive play and could certainly stand to get stronger physically. Still, those are common developmental steps for teenage prospects that are much easier to look past than Connelly’s off-ice issues.
Connelly’s Off-Ice Issues
There’s no way to sugarcoat Connelly’s behavioral issues that off no shortage of NHL executives and scouts along the way. In 2022, he shared a Snapchat picture of a teammate beside a stack of building blocks positioned in the shape of a swastika.
While that incident is the center of Connelly’s troubled reputation, it’s not the only item on his rap sheet. One year before, he is alleged to have directed a racial slur at an opposing player, a claim that resulted in a suspension but was never fully verified. He also played for four separate amateur teams during a bumpy two-year span from 2020 to 2022, including a stint with the Bishop Kearney hockey program in Rochester, New York, that lasted just two weeks.
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Connelly’s Road to Redemption
Although he’s been drafted, Connelly will still have to work to earn the trust of his teammates, coaches, the Golden Knights and the NHL communities. To the teen’s credit, he’s taking the proper initial steps to get there. He’s participated in volunteer work and taken diversity training, even assisting the coaching staff of a multi-cultural under-14 team organized by the US-based “Hockey Players of Color” group at an international tournament in Florida (from ‘‘Who will draft Trevor Connelly? Inside the NHL’s evolving scrutiny of top prospects,” New York Times, 02/22/24).
Connelly, his family and his representatives have claimed that this pattern of behavior is driven by ignorance and immaturity rather than any inherently racist attitudes. That argument was obviously convincing enough for Golden Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon and the Vegas front office. However, it will be up to Connelly to continue to prove personal growth, beginning with his enrollment at Providence in the fall.
“I’m really confident we’ll do everything we can to help this player be a great player and a great person,” said McCrimmon. “If we weren’t comfortable that there’s a good person there, we would not have made this selection. That’s something I feel really strongly about.”
Given their lack of draft capital and desperately needed infusion of young talent in the pipeline, it made plenty of sense for the Golden Knights to swing for the fences with their first pick in the 2024 Draft. Connelly, however, represents a specific kind of risk, one that hasn’t paid off in the recent cases of similarly controversial players like Mitchell Miller and Logan Mailloux, whose arrivals were met with outrage in Boston and Montreal, respectively. The organization will do what it can to keep their new draftee out of trouble, but it will ultimately fall on Connelly to prove that his days of troubling, ignorant patterns of behavior are behind him.
