PWHL Detroit Acquires Knight for Third-Overall Pick

A long-reported deal between PWHL Detroit and PWHL Las Vegas was announced on Tuesday, with Detroit acquiring Hilary Knight in return for the third overall pick in Wednesday’s draft.

TRADE ALERT 🚨

PWHL Detroit has acquired forward Hilary Knight from PWHL Las Vegas in exchange for our first round pick (third overall) in the 2026 PWHL Entry Draft.
📰 bit.ly/4vWrNE6

[image or embed]

— PWHL Detroit (@pwhl–detroit.bsky.social) 10:01 AM · Jun 16, 2026

I touched on this yesterday when the league announced the draft order but this is just a terrible trade to me. The third overall pick has the probability of being a impact player for a long time in this league. Knight has one or two more years left in the tank and spent most of last season injured. If her name weren’t Hilary Knight, no one would make this deal.

By all reports, there’s quite a bit of drama and confusion that led to this move. Supposedly, when Phase Two of the expansion player dispersal process opened, Detroit negotiated a deal with Knight, only for Las Vegas to then use their Expansion Foundational Offer on her. Knight preferred Detroit but EFOs were meant to be binding, requiring her to go to Las Vegas despite her attempts to refuse.

Detroit, in the meantime, had moved on to signing Knight’s Seattle teammates Hannah Bilka and Cayla Barnes under the understanding that they already had a deal with Knight.

To resolve the issue, Detroit agreed to trade their first-round pick to Las Vegas in return for Knight after the league’s trade freeze lifted.

This is further complicated by the fact that the league had not announced its draft order at the time of the handshake deal. As such, Detroit general manager Manon Rheaume could have made the move under the assumption that expansion teams would pick at the end of the first round, as they did last season, only for her ninth overall pick to suddenly become the third overall pick.

Yet another layer to the story involves vague claims of tampering around the expansion dispersal process. Rheaume has publicly stated that the league signed off on everything that Detroit did, assuring her that it was all by the book. A convoluted expansion process makes it easy to question, though, how Detroit was able to come to an agreement with Knight before Las Vegas used their EFO on her.

Rheaume doesn’t have a history as GM to draw from to add understanding to this. Maybe she simply valued the first-round draft pick so little that it was easy for her to make this trade. It could be that twelfth or ninth or third, this was worth it to her.

Or it could be that the PWHL, which has a history of making things up on the fly, imposed the trade as a way of trying to make everyone happy. Or it could be a stealth punishment for Detroit circumventing the rules, no matter what the public statements are.

Lack of transparency into the process is bound to breed frustration and conspiracy theories. However it happened, Detroit now has Knight but doesn’t have the third overall pick in a draft taking place in their own city.