Tonight, Game 4 of the Walter Cup playoffs is occurring between the Montreal Victoire and the Ottawa Charge.
If you’re not sure what league this is, I don’t blame you. This is the Professional Women’s Hockey League, the latest league for women’s ice hockey in North America. The PWHL is the latest of an alphabet soup’s worth of leagues that have existed since the late 1990s. There has been two iterations of a National Women’s Hockey League, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, and the Premier Hockey Federation, the latter two of which merged to form the current PWHL.
Currently, the league has eight teams, but with plans for at least four more. The league has eight teams in established NHL markets, although future expansion includes Hamilton, Ontario — a city which is not an NHL market, but has been a good incubator of female hockey players for decades.
The league has found plenty of growth opportunities, especially in the last two years. They have taken chances by moving some games to non-PWHL markets in what are called “takeovers.” Teams have moved home games from small rinks to major NHL-sized arenas.
It’s a far cry when teams in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and the Premier Hockey Federation were in practice rinks or small community arenas, and were lucky to get a thousand paying customers.
Two nights ago, for example, a record crowd of 16,894 attended the third game of the Walter Cup series. The throng was roaring when the host Charge, facing the end of its season in the final five minutes of regulation, got a pair of late goals, including the game-winner with about a minute to play, to win the game 2-1.
Aside from fan attention, what is making this league great is the collective willingness to believe that fans will come to see a good product. That was not necessarily guaranteed in the late 2010s when more than 200 prominent women’s ice hockey players founded the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, playing their own touring games and creating a serious talent deficit in the CWHL and PHF.
The game being played currently on PWHL rinks is of a quality which is much better than even a decade ago. The game is quicker, more skilled, and more physical (albeit body contact is somewhat regulated). Gone are the days when you may have had six players on a 20-woman roster who knew how to fire a slapshot. Everyone is a good player in today’s PWHL, and the product is attracting sponsors and broadcasters. In the United States, games are found on the Ion network and freely on YouTube.
If you have a chance, check your local listings this evening. You might become a fan.