The Professional Women’s Hockey League is back up and running after the Olympic hiatus, with more focus on the sport than ever before.
This is no exaggeration. According to NBC, the women’s hockey gold medal game between the United States and Canada averaged 5.3 million views in the United States, making it the most-watched women’s hockey game on record. In Canada, 4.2 million people watched the final minutes as the United States won 2-1 in overtime.
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Many of the game’s players – including Megan Keller, who scored the golden goal for Team USA – returned to their PWHL teams from Milan and played in front of thousands of fans, with many more watching on television.
In the past, before the PWHL was launched in January 2024, there was never any thought of establishing a professional league for all the best players.
“We’ve never come back from the Olympics and gone straight into the league — we (used to) come back and our fans never get to see us play or they have to wait until the next Worlds, the next Olympics,” Keller said in an interview. Competitor.
“This is a great time for women’s hockey and hockey as a whole to bring more fans to our sport and league.”
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If you’re one of the new fans Keller talks about and you haven’t been following the PWHL season very closely so far, that’s okay too. Competitor Here to help.
Here’s everything you need to know about the PWHL.
What is PWHL?
Let’s start with the basics. The PWHL is the newest women’s professional hockey league in North America and the third launched since 2007 with the hope of creating a sustainable business model for women’s hockey.
The league is backed by Mark Walter, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and now consists of eight teams: the original six in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, Minnesota and New York, plus two new expansion teams in Seattle and Vancouver. Mark Walter and his wife Kimbra own the league and its eight teams under a single-entity ownership model, meaning there are no individual team owners as we commonly see in other major professional sports leagues such as the NHL, NFL and MLB.
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The PWHL’s advisory board includes Dodgers president Stan Kasten, tennis legend Billie Jean King and her partner Ilana Kloss.
PWHL rules
Since its inception, the PWHL has made some changes to the typical professional hockey rulebook.
Teams earn points through a 3-2-1 points system rather than the standard 2-1-0 points system used by the NHL. In the PWHL, wins in regulation are worth up to 3 points, while wins in overtime and penalty shootouts are worth 2 points. Losing a point in overtime or a penalty shootout means nothing when losing in regulation.
After the regular season, the four teams with the highest scores will advance to the playoffs.
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The league introduced a “jailbreak” rule in 2024: If a team scores while shorthanded, they can release a player who is receiving a minor penalty from the penalty area. Last year, the PWHL also debuted the “no escape” rule, which means when a team takes a penalty kick, players must stay on the field for the first penalty kick, rather than having coaches immediately bring out their top penalty killers. The rule increased power play efficiency by 3% last season.
In the 2025-26 season, the league only made some minor adjustments. Now, teams must have three goaltenders on their roster — Minnesota had two at one point last season — and coaches will no longer challenge video reviews. Now, all reviews will be initiated by the league through on-field officials or the situation room.
Another big difference in the PWHL is how it determines entry draft order. The PWHL uses a “gold plan” rather than a lottery system like the NHL and other leagues use that gives the worst teams the best odds for the first pick.
The concept is this: Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, it begins earning “draft order points” in all subsequent games using the league’s standard points system. The team with the most “Draft Order Points” at the end of the regular season will receive the No. 1 pick in the draft. The second non-playoff team will receive the second overall pick. Playoff teams will select three to six teams based on reverse order of regular season standings.
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Where to find Olympic stars
61 PWHL players (30% of the entire league) participated in the Milan Olympics, including all 23 players from Canada and 16 players from the United States.
Keller and U.S. star goalie Erin Frankel both play for Boston Fleet, along with Finnish forward Suzanne Tapani and Swiss star Alina Mueller, who scored the bronze medal against Sweden.
Taylor Heise, who assisted Keller in scoring the gold goal, plays for Minnesota Frost along with fellow U.S. teammate Kendall Coyne Schofield, a member of Long Term Injured Reserve that includes Lee Stecklein, Kelly Pannek, Grace Zumwinkle and Britta Curl-Salemme.
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Team USA captain Hilary Knight, who plays for the Seattle Torrent but is currently competing on LTIR, recently revealed that she competes in the Olympics with a torn medial collateral ligament. Her teammates in Seattle include Alex Carpenter, Hannah Birka, Kayla Barnes and Canadian forward Julia Gosling.
Team USA’s backup goalie Gwyneth Philips is one of the best players in the PWHL for the Ottawa Charge.
Canada captain Mary-Philip Poulin plays for Montreal Victory along with Laura Stacey, Erin Ambrose, Katie Tabin, No. 1 goaltender Ann Renee Desbiens and U.S. forward Haley Skamula.
Daryl Watts, who leads Canada in scoring in her first Olympics, joins eight other Olympians playing for the Toronto Scepters, including Emma Maltais, Renata Fast, Natalie Spooner and Blayre Turnbull.
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No one on the Canadian team scored more goals than Sarah Fillier, who plays for the New York Sirens, and Christine O’Neal, who scored Canada’s only goal in the gold medal game.
The full list of PWHL Olympians can be found here .
A storyline worth watching
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The Minnesota Frosts won the PWHL’s first two Walter Cup championships.
After the league’s rosters were decimated following expansion — each team lost four players in the draft and more in free agency as players opted to sign in Vancouver and Seattle — some wondered whether Minnesota could play the season without some of its top forwards (Mikayla Kawa) and defensemen (Sophie Jacques and Claire Thompson).
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But Frost has essentially picked up where they left off. No team has scored more goals than Minnesota (51), which ranks third in the league standings. Heise leads the PWHL points standings (19 points), with Curl-Salemme and Coyne Schofield rounding out the top five. Nicole Hensley ranks third among goalies with a 1.85 goals-against average and a .937 save percentage. And, with Jacques and Thompson missing at offensive guard, rookie Kendall Cooper and sophomore Mae Batherson have stepped up and are in lockstep on the Frost blueline.
As they’ve shown the past two years, all Frost needs to do is make waves heading into the playoffs.
Can the New York Kraken finally turn things around?
After finishing last in the PWHL standings for two straight seasons, New York general manager Pascal Daoust reshuffled the roster to give the Kraken a younger look for the 2025-26 season.
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The Sirens selected Czech forward Kristina Kartuenkova with the No. 1 pick in the draft — adding Fillier with the No. 1 pick last season. Daoust also traded forward Abby Roark to the Montreal Victories for O’Neal and No. 1 guard Ella Shelton to the Toronto Scepters for the No. 3 pick in the 2025 draft, who turned into Patty Kazmaier-winner Casey O’Brien.
The Sirens held the fourth and final playoff spot as of Wednesday morning, with Fillier, Kartunkwa and O’Brien leading the offense. No one in the PWHL has scored more goals than Kartuenkova.
While there is still a lot of hockey to be played, the Sirens played meaningful hockey in March, which was a huge improvement over the past two years. The team also defeated fifth-place Ottawa 6-2 on Sunday in front of 8,264 fans (the most at home in franchise history), which could serve as a key springboard for what’s to come.
Caroline Harvey’s campaign
The 2026 PWHL draft class is packed with elite talent, none more so than Olympic MVP Caroline Harvey, who is completing her senior season at the University of Wisconsin.
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The defender is tied for the most points scored by any player at the Olympics and is already one of the best offensive guards in the game. The team that wins the PWHL’s “Gold Plan” will gain the right to select her with the first overall pick in the draft.
No team has officially been eliminated from the playoffs; however, the Seattle Torrents and Vancouver Goldeneyes currently sit at the bottom of the standings. The league’s two expansion teams look incredible on paper after poaching top players from the original six teams, but have yet to produce consistent results this season.
A few regular-season wins could get either team out of the basement, but for now, they appear to be competing with the sixth-place Toronto Scepters and fifth-place Ottawa Charge for Harvey.
Teams that miss out on Harvey can still draft U.S. Olympian Abbey Murphy, Laila Edwards — the first black woman to represent Team USA in the Olympics who can play forward and defense — Kirsten Simms and Tessa Janecke, who are both expected to enter the PWHL draft.
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Where will the league expand next?
According to Amy Scheer, executive vice president of business operations, the league will add two to four teams next season, increasing from eight teams to 12 teams.
“It would be great if we could work the schedule we had last year,” Scheer told Front Office Sports, meaning an expansion team could be announced before the end of the regular season in April.
There are plenty of options for the PWHL’s second wave of expansion, and the league’s “Takeover Tour” should once again prove to be a solid proving ground. Vancouver and Seattle each hosted neutral-site games last season and successfully secured the league’s first expansion franchises.
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This year’s 16-stop show drew huge and sometimes record-breaking crowds in cities including Halifax, Quebec City, Washington, D.C., and Denver.
Detroit has long been a front-runner for expansion and will host its fourth neutral-site game on March 28 at Little Caesars Arena. After breaking US attendance records in January, Washington now looks like an excellent choice.
If the player has his own way, according to Athletic team A poll of women’s hockey players shows the next wave of expansion will include Detroit, Denver, Chicago and Edmonton.
How to watch
In Canada, rights to all 120 PWHL games this season have been allocated to TSN and RDS, CBC/Radio-Canada, Sportsnet and Prime Video.
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In the United States, the race is free to watch on YouTube and has been broadcast regionally, with several US national partners such as Fox and Paramount televising the race. Regional partners include:
Boston: NESN and TV 38
Minnesota: FDSN North and FOX 9+
New York: MSG Networks and WWOR MY9
Seattle: KONG and FOX 13+
key date
March 30: trade deadline
March 31: List freeze date
April 25: PWHL regular season ends
View the complete PWHL 2025-26 schedule here.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Toronto Scepters, Minnesota Frost, Vancouver Goldeneyes, New York Sirens, Montreal Victory, Ottawa Charge, Seattle Rapids, Boston Fleet, NHL, Sports Business, Women’s Hockey
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