Daley Discusses Hockey Path and What's Ahead

Quiet leadership and great character.
That's how the people who know Trevor Daley best describe his personality.
"He's definitely one of those guys who will give you the shirt off his back if you're in trouble or if you're in need," said Bryan Rust, who won two Stanley Cups with Daley in 2016 and '17. "He's always going to be that first guy to come try and help you out."
Those qualities will help Daley, 37,
in his new role as the Penguins' hockey operations advisor
after he officially wrapped up his 16-year professional career.
Daley, 37, took the time to discuss that and so much more - including the experiences that have shaped him as a player and a person and his current involvement with the Hockey Diversity Alliance - in the latest episode of The Scoop podcast and with PittsburghPenguins.com.

Penguins Podcasts: The Scoop
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Episode 38: The Scoop with Trevor Daley
Daley was born on Oct. 9, 1983, to his father Trevor Sr. and mother Trudy. Trevor Sr. immigrated to Canada from Jamaica when he was 15, which is where he met Trudy, who was from Toronto.
Trudy was her son's primary caregiver. And because Trudy had him when she was just 17, providing plenty of structure in Trevor's life was important to her.
"Being from not the greatest neighborhood and having lots of distractions around, she was always staying on top of stuff like that," Trevor said. "So just a lot of discipline. Having her raise me the way she felt was what was right, I didn't think it was right back then (laughs). But now as a dad and going through the process as a parent, I look back and if I could be half the parent that my mom was for me, I think I'll do a pretty good job."
Trevor also had plenty of support from extended family. His grandmother, grandfather, two sets of aunts and uncles and a cousin - all on his mother's side - lived together in a house in the Regent Park neighborhood of downtown Toronto.
"We had nine people in it, so it was a busy house," Trevor said before adding with a laugh, "One bathroom, too. You didn't have much time when you got in there. You had to be real quick."
Trevor shared a room in the house with his uncle Donald, with Trevor sleeping on the floor for much of his childhood - "you learned to not make any noise and keep your mouth shut," he said with a grin.
Trevor idolized his uncle and wanted to do everything he did, including hockey, as Donald played games around the Toronto area.
"Definitely my biggest role model for my career and my life was him," Trevor said. "Being a good kid went along with being a good hockey player. He weighed a lot on me in terms of not getting into trouble, not making terrible decisions. He really shaped me."
After a few years of going to Donald's games, Trevor went to his mother at age 6 and told her he wanted to play. So Trudy signed him up, and the family all chipped in for Trevor to get hockey equipment.
"I actually started later than when most kids get started," Trevor said. "Like my son started at 2. Most kids are skating and have been playing for a while by that age."
Trevor took to hockey right away, and after playing for a few teams in the Greater Toronto Hockey League, he made the Don Hills Flyers AAA team at age 9 and remained there for the next few years.
And while Trevor obviously loved the sport, it didn't always love him back. As a Black hockey player, Trevor faced racial discrimination and bigotry while playing youth hockey, particularly during games. "My mom would always know when something happened on the ice," he said.
And while Trudy wanted Trevor to protect himself and fight back if somebody tried to bully him, she realized that wasn't always an option, especially as he got older. So, she told her son the most effective thing he could do was let his play speak for itself and to simply be better than the hateful people who were trying to make him feel unworthy.
"That's going to hurt them even more," Trevor said. "If they're that type of person, they would be so mad if they know that there's a Black guy that's better than them. And that's kind of how my mom kind of worded it for me."
And while Trevor said he was never necessarily the best player as a kid, especially since he grew up with a fellow future NHLer in Jason Spezza, he was always one of the better ones. That allowed him to take Trudy's advice and make the Vaughan Vipers, a Tier II junior team, at just 14 years old while playing against 18- and 19-year-olds.
"We weren't a good team at all. We were actually really bad," Daley said. "But I was the youngest guy on the team; I played probably 25-30 minutes a night. And it was obviously an opportunity for me to play with older guys and kind of prepare me for the next level."
The next year, Daley got drafted in the first round, 10th overall, by the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League. He was thrilled to not only take the next step in his career, but to finally get his own room and his own bed.
"I think that's why I was so happy to go play juniors," he said with a laugh.
Daley's experiences, both positive and negative, in Sault Ste. Marie were incredibly formative both professionally and personally. It was there that Trevor met his future wife, Kristy West, with a little help from the future general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
"Our team stick boy at the time was Kyle Dubas," Daley said. "And him and Kristy were locker mates and had classes together. So he was the one that actually got me Kristy's number, believe it or not (laughs)."
Trevor and Kristy would later pay it forward with one of his Penguins teammates. After they got married, the couple bought an offseason home in Sault Ste. Marie, next door to a family named the Burtons who had three kids - Jarrett, Tanner and Kelsey.
Since they were both hockey families - Jarrett and Tanner currently both play professionally -the Daleys and Burtons became close. Kelsey later moved in with the Daleys when Trevor was playing in Chicago to help them out and gain some new life experiences while she was finishing college.
Kelsey accompanied them to Pittsburgh after the trade, and soon after, Trevor's teammate Bryan Rust joined them for dinner one night. Now, almost five years later, Bryan and Kelsey are married and expecting their first child in May 2021.
On the ice in Sault Ste. Marie, Daley thrived while working with assistant coach Steve Harrison, who oversaw the defense. He helped Daley's game grow - particularly his skating ability - with plenty of encouragement and opportunities, and eventually the blueliner was drafted in the second round (43rd overall) by Dallas in the 2002 NHL Draft following his third season with the Greyhounds.
"The draft was actually in Toronto, so obviously I had a ton of support there," Daley said. "Willie O'Ree was actually there, so that was one of the first people I got to be congratulated by. He's a really great, great person. But yeah, it's just such a memorable time. I remember getting drafted then going back to the house and having a backyard party with friends, family. Just a special, special moment."
Daley was named team captain in his fourth season with Sault Ste. Marie, and it was in March of that year when Daley, who was 19 at the time, was victimized by then-head coach and general manager John Vanbiesbrouck. He used a racial slur in reference to Daley several times when talking with other members of the team.
When Daley learned about the incident, he quit the Greyhounds and returned home to Toronto. He rejoined the team a few days later after Vanbiesbrouck stepped down as head coach and general manager, but still retained his 25 percent ownership stake of the team.
"It obviously hurt," Daley said. "It bothered me. It hurt my mom even more. Now that I look back at what happened, the regrets I have from then was that it probably wasn't handled the right way back then. Maybe if it was handled a little bit better, some of the incidents that are still happening wouldn't have happened. I don't feel that the punishment fit what really happened."
And Daley feels that if that situation had been handled differently at the time, what happened to him may not have happened to other Black players who came after him like Akim Aliu and Wayne Simmonds.
"That's what bothers me today," Daley said. "I have a young son who loves hockey, who wants to be like his dad and looks like his dad. And as a dad and where I'm at, I don't want him to ever go through what we had to go through."
It was incredibly difficult for Daley to experience that at such a young age, but he put it behind him as best he could and finished that season with 20 goals and 53 points in 57 games, turning professional the next year.
He went on to play nine NHL seasons with the Stars, and Dallas will always have a special place in Daley's heart for a number of reasons. They gave Daley his start and it's the first place he played, but what he cherishes the most is the people he met there.
Daley entered the league with Steve Ott, who's one of his closest friends, and they looked up to teammates like Sergei Zubov, Mike Modano, Marty Turco and even current Boston Bruins general manager Don Sweeney.
"Don was my roommate. He was the same age as my mom," Daley said with a laugh. "I always love to tell people that. I also look at guys like Billy Guerin, Manny Malhotra - guys that were just great pros. Those are guys where I wanted to not just play as long as them, but I wanted character like they had. Those are great character guys. That's the thing that I wanted to surround myself with, was good character people. We had so many of those in Dallas."
And that's exactly the kind of pro Daley became.
When he was eventually acquired by the Penguins on Dec. 14, 2015 after a trade to Chicago didn't work out, Daley regained confidence with a fresh start and became a quiet yet vital supporting member of a team filled with superstars.
"He doesn't really speak up a ton, but when he did, it was definitely meaningful," Rust said. "But just the way he carried himself, the way he reacted in certain situations throughout the year and whatnot, spoke a lot about him and his character."
Daley went through the hardest situation of his life in the spring of 2016, as Trudy was in the midst of a battle with cancer. And throughout that entire playoff run, Trevor would fly home to Ontario between every series to visit Trudy in the hospital.
After Daley suffered a broken ankle in the Eastern Conference Final that sidelined him for the remainder of the postseason, he was able to spend more time with his mother, who told him how much she wanted to see him with the Stanley Cup. So after the Penguins clinched in Game 6 of the Final against San Jose on June 12, Sidney Crosby handed the trophy to Daley first to fulfill Trudy's final wish.
"I FaceTimed her right after," Daley said. "She did get to see it. She was watching from the hospital."
Trudy passed nine days later at age 51, and Trevor will always be grateful that one of his mother's last images was of her son fulfilling his lifelong dream.
"It was a rollercoaster year," Daley said. "You had your biggest highs of highs and then you got your biggest lows of lows. But my mom was sick for a while. You're never prepared for losing anybody. But just to know that she was not going to suffer anymore, that she is in a better place, made things in perspective a little bit.
"Then being able to win the very next year and be there and do it correctly made the year before even more special in so many crazy different ways. I got to spend more time with my mom, which was nice. Got to be a part of a team that won the Stanley Cup. When I look back on it today, I got the best of both worlds."
Daley ended up appearing in 1,058 games split between Dallas, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit, recording 89 goals, 220 assists and 309 points. Only 13 active players have appeared in more regular-season games than Daley's 1,058.
And while it's never easy to make the decision to hang them up, Daley is looking forward to what's next in his post-playing career. Not just in his new role with the Penguins, but in his work with the Hockey Diversity Alliance (HDA).
Daley is one of seven current and former NHL players who formed the HDA in June, with their mission being to eradicate systemic racism and intolerance in hockey. Aliu and Evander Kane are co-heads of the organization, with Daley, Simmonds, Matt Dumba, Chris Stewart and Joel Ward serving on the group's executive committee.
The conversation behind starting the HDA first began after Aliu's story came out in November 2019. When he was playing for the Rockford IceHogs of the American Hockey League in the 2009-10 season, Aliu had an experience similar to the one Daley had in Sault Ste. Marie, when then-head coach Bill Peters repeatedly used racial slurs in reference to him. It led to Peters resigning as head coach of the Calgary Flames.
That was just one of many incidents Aliu had to deal with throughout his career, as he also experienced racism and bullying at the hands of his teammates when he played for the Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League.
"Throughout some incidents along his route, he reached out to me for support," Daley said. "I remember getting that call from him this last time, and after reading his story and him reaching out to me on prior occasions before that, it kind of set something off in me. I was early in my career and I just wasn't prepared for it when he first called. I wasn't ready for it. This last time he called me; I was ready. I wanted to help."
So the group got together on a Zoom video call to discuss how they could make the game more accessible for kids who love the game and ensure they don't experience the same racial discrimination that they did.
"We were talking about our experiences, what we went through as kids," Daley said. "We all looked alike, we're all the same color, we all dealt with the same things, our moms and dads said the same thing. It was so organic that it was just special. It really was special. And then we felt that this has to happen. We got to be a voice, we got to speak. That's how it started."
Daley's involvement with the HDA is as an advocate and a supporter, and he feels positive and hopeful about what they can achieve, particularly in the times we are all living in right now.
"We're in a pandemic, which is terrible," Daley said. "But it's giving people a chance to just kind of sit at home and reflect on what is going on in the world. And a lot of people haven't had time to do that, and a lot of good people probably haven't had time to do that. And now they're seeing it. Now they're paying a little bit of attention to it.
"So that's what gives me a little bit of positivity, is that this is going to last, this is going to make things better. And hopefully this conversation never ends and it stays open. And if there was a playbook for it, for how to do this - trust me, it would have been done a long time ago. Nobody knows. So we've just got to keep this conversation going. And at the end of the day, it comes down to what's right and what's wrong."
Daley is certainly doing what he can to use his voice and make the world a better place for him and Kristy's son Trevor and daughter Emery. The entire family is thrilled to be back in Pittsburgh and starting this new chapter.
"I'm so happy to be back," Daley said. "I'm excited about the opportunity and looking forward to getting started."