The wait is almost over — and what’s a couple more days, anyway? Especially when, as Boston forward Hilary Knight points out: “This has needed to happen for decades.”
At last, 2024 is the year. The Professional Women’s Hockey League will usher it in by dropping the first-ever puck on its inaugural season, on Jan. 1 at 12:30 p.m. ET at Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre.
The historic first game will see Toronto host New York, while the PWHL’s other four teams open their seasons on subsequent days: Montreal visits Ottawa on Jan. 2, and Boston hosts Minnesota a day later.
The games will mark professional debuts for so many. Returns to the pro game for some of the biggest stars after nearly four years spent boycotting the PHF and waiting for the league they felt they deserved. A new league for players who were once part of the now defunct PHF (which the PWHL bought out). And a comeback for some who thought they’d hung up their skates for good, but were lured back by the PWHL.
Here are 24 details to help get you set for the action coming from the six-team league that’s debuting in 2024.
1. Twenty-four is also the number of games each team will play this regular season, which wraps up on May 5. The top four teams make the playoffs. (The 2024-25 campaign will feature a 32-game regular season for each team and run November through May. The inaugural season is shortened because of a later start.)
2. Toronto plays in both the first and last games of the regular season, and Hamilton-born forward Sarah Nurse likes her team’s chances. “We have a lot of players who people hate to play against — like Emma Maltais, Blayre Turnbull, Renata Fast, Jocelyn Larocque. I could go down our roster. I think we’re going to be a very gritty, hard-nosed team who plays very fast. I don’t know if I can think of a team off the top of my head who can match our speed … We had a team meeting and we want to win this year. We’re not trying to rebuild — like, what are we rebuilding, right?” Nurse says with a laugh. “We’re trying to win in 2024.”
3. The 157 players in the PWHL represent 12 different countries. Canada leads the way when it comes to national representation with 90 players — that’s 57 per cent of the league. The U.S. is second with 53 players, and after that, representation by country is slim. Five players are from Czechia, two are from Sweden, while a single player comes from each of Hungary, Germany, Austria, Finland, France, Japan and Switzerland.
4. Akane Shiga, the lone player from Japan, also holds the distinction of being the youngest player on any roster, at 22 years old. The Ottawa forward turns 23 in March. Back in 2021, Shiga became the first Japanese player to score against the U.S. at the world championships.
5. Tickets to Ottawa’s home opener on Jan. 2 at TD place are sold out. The arena seats 6,500, and can hold 8,000 fans with temporary seating and standing room.
6. While training camp was going on in Ottawa, with intense on-ice drills and tryouts and off-ice workouts, players also found time to bond off the ice. Ottawa captain Brianne Jenner and her wife, Hayleigh Cudmore, hosted the team for American Thanksgiving dinner. This is especially impressive given Cudmore gave birth to twins just a month earlier. Seriously — what a hero!
7. Jenner, the veteran Team Canada forward, is signed to a three-year contract with Ottawa, and that’s the longest PWHL contract on offer. The league’s collective-bargaining agreement requires each team to sign no fewer than six players to three-year deals. Other players signed to the full term include Marie-Philip Poulin (Montreal), Megan Keller (Boston), Renata Fast (Toronto), Kendall Coyne Schofield (Minnesota) and Abby Roque (New York).
8. American forward Alex Carpenter is among the stars inked to a three-year deal, too, in New York. And you won’t find a player in the league who’s had quite the journey to this point that Carpenter has. She’s played pro in Russia, China, and New York — twice. The first stop in New York was with the NWHL, and now with the PWHL, which is her fourth pro league in nine years. Carpenter calls her career “very unique,” and there’s no debating that. She’ll be one of New York’s alternate captains this season.
9. New York was the first team to name its on-ice leadership group, on Dec. 21 in a ceremony at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Players were on the famed outdoor rink there, flanked by the giant Christmas tree. That’s when B.C. born defender Micah Zandee-Hart was announced as New York’s first-ever captain. The 26-year-old is an Olympic and world champion, and captained Cornell in nearby Ithaca, N.Y., in 2019-20. The team’s alternate captains are Carpenter and Ella Shelton, the defender from Ingersoll, Ont.
10. There are 33 players entering the PWHL straight out of the NCAA — that’s 21 per cent of the league. The fresh-out-of-college class is led by the PWHL’s first-ever No. 1 draft pick, Taylor Heise. The 2022 Patty Kazmaier winner was selected by her hometown team in Minnesota.
11. Heise is in good company when it comes to Minnesotans playing at home. A total of 11 local players fill out Minnesota’s roster, which is nearly half the team. But that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, since the city is a hotbed for hockey talent. Team USA’s roster at the most recent Rivalry Series game in November featured eight Minnesotans.
12. Montreal, too, took a local approach to team building. The roster boasts eight Quebec-born players. This includes long-time Canadian captain, the ever-so-clutch Poulin, and Team Canada’s no. 1 netminder, Ann-Renée Desbiens.
13. Ottawa-born Jamie Lee Rattray is among eight Canadians on Boston’s roster. Rattray chimes in with a scouting report on her team, and it’s heavy on praise for a pair of Americans she’s used to playing against. “We have a lot of depth. We’re gritty, and we’ve got a lot of goal scoring. I know it’s hard to play against my teammates, so I’d rather play with them. Like Hilary Knight, she’s a pretty good teammate. I’ll take her any day. And I think about some of the D. Megan Keller? If I had to play against someone like that regularly?” Rattray says with a laugh. “Thank God she’s on my team now.”
14. Boston’s roster also includes Minnesotan Gigi Marvin, who retired from international hockey in 2021, but made her comeback for the PWHL. The three-time Olympic medallist and five-time world champ made the team out of training camp and, at 36, is the oldest player in the PWHL.
15. Hilary Knight addressed the biggest elephant in the PWHL’s room this season: Teams don’t have nicknames yet. In October, a PWHL trademark request revealed potential names: Toronto Torch, Montreal Echo, Ottawa Alert, Minnesota Superior, New York Sound and Boston Wicked. And as Knight observed, fans did not find those names … wicked.
“I kind of like the slow roll-out option, but I saw that we were getting roasted for some of the names and I was like, ‘Okay, that’s fair,’” Knight says, laughing. “You know, I think it goes both ways. I remember when the [Seattle] Kraken had how many years to roll everything out, like two or three years? I was like ‘Oh, this is awful.’ Now it’s like ‘Oh my gosh the Kraken, those colours are so cool.’ Sometimes things just take time. And time will tell what’s what, what are good names, what are bad names.”
16. The highest salary in the PWHL this season is north of $80,000, and each roster is allotted at least six spots for players earning “no less than $80,000,” according to the league’s CBA. Exactly how north of $80,000 isn’t publicly known — players are adhering to league policy and not publicly discussing financial terms of their contracts.
17. The lowest salary this year in the PWHL is $35,000 (no more than nine players per roster can be paid the lowest end), and the average salary per team is $55,000, all according to the league’s CBA.
18. Cassie Campbell-Pascall was named the PWHL’s Special Advisor on Dec. 18. The two-time Olympic gold medallist left her job as a broadcaster after more than two decades on television, where she became the first woman to call colour commentary on Hockey Night in Canada. We reached out to find out what her role with the PWHL entails, and Campbell-Pascall broke it down this way: “Helping on both the business and hockey ops side. Particularly with duties that help the league grow and initially help start with all foundational things that require the league to flourish.” It sounds like a big job, but no doubt Campbell-Pascall is up to the task. The former Team Canada captain has been making waves in hockey her entire life.
19. There are eight arenas tabbed to host PWHL games this season, so far, and there could be more. Six of the 72 scheduled games are listed as “TBD” when it comes to location, for games in Minnesota, Boston, Montreal, and New York. Only Ottawa (TD place) and Toronto (Mattamy Athletic Centre) have full-time home arenas for games.
20. New York is tabbed to play most of their games in Bridgeport, Conn., at Total Mortgage Arena, where the capacity is 10,000, and at UBS in Elmont, N.Y., which seats 17,255. It’s a 99 kilometre drive from one rink to the other.
21. Jillian Dempsey’s students will be watching her from afar. The Boston native and former school teacher was drafted 66th overall by Montreal — a surprise to many, including her. Dempsey is the all-time leading scorer in the PHF.
22. New York forward Kayla Vespa, who’s from Hamilton, Ont., is the lightest player in the league at 106 pounds, while her teammate Abby Roque and Toronto goalie Kristen Campbell are tied for heaviest in the PWHL, at 181 pounds. This is according to Eliteprospects.com, who provide items No. 22 and 23 on our list.
23. There’s a one-foot difference between the shortest PWHL player — Ottawa defender Amanda Boulier — and the tallest — New York goalie Abbey Levy. Boulier stands five-foot-one, while Levy is six-foot-one.
24. When the PWHL released its jersey designs on Nov. 14 — each team’s home city written diagonally across the front — fans had plenty to say about what many saw as a bland style. “Dang!” Nurse says, of the reaction to the league’s jersey reveal. “It really does keep people up at night.” Not her, though. She explains why here.
“We’re literally turning around an entire league — not just the jerseys — in six months,” Nurse says. “I don’t think the little girl who’s watching me in the stands is thinking about my jersey. She’s watching me because she thinks that one day she can be on that ice like I am. And I think it’s going to be pretty cool. Our inaugural jerseys are that vintage style, and I think as a collector’s item, that’s going to be pretty cool to look back and say, ‘Oh, I was able to get a jersey in the inaugural season.’ Obviously next year we’re going to have different jerseys. There’s going to evolution and growth. I think it’s going to be pretty cool if you cop a jersey in the inaugural season.”
A couple days after they were made available online, Toronto’s jerseys sold out in all sizes. https://shop.thepwhl.com/products/toronto-replica-jersey
Good on you if you copped one.
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