In 2023, the first paid, centralized, North American, professional hockey league for women was formed: The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). At its inception, it had six teams—the Montréal Victoire, the Toronto Sceptres, and the Ottawa Charge from Canada and the Minnesota Frost, the New York Sirens, and the Boston Fleet from the US—all of whom would compete for the Walter Cup with 30 games each in the regular season and four teams making it to playoffs. 

Prior to the formation of the league, women were forced to play internationally, play without salary, or stop playing altogether after college. While there were some leagues in the U.S. and Canada, neither stability nor salary was guaranteed. The Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) was formed in 2007, considered the most centralized league to date, but players were not paid. One reporter for The Athletic described the CWHL as “a step above a beer league only because of the Olympians and future Hall of Famers who took the ice each week.” 

In 2015, American player Dani Rylan Kearny was frustrated by the lack of options in America and formed the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), which would become the first women’s league to pay its players, though salaries only ranged from $10,000–26,000 annually. Due to financial issues, the league had to cut player salaries significantly, causing many players to leave altogether. 

After the collapse of the CWHL in 2019, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) was formed—a group of women who refused to play hockey in North America without a stable, well-paying league to play for. Mark Walter, the owner of the LA Lakers after whom the Walter Cup is named, began making moves to purchase the league, and successfully did so in 2023, in collaboration with Billie Jean King Enterprises. In 2025, the Seattle Torrent and the Vancouver Goldeneyes were added, expanding the league to eight teams.

2026 was the first Olympic season of the PWHL’s lifetime. 30% of the women’s Olympic hockey players play in the PWHL, and 16 out of 23 of the U.S. team members play in the PWHL. The U.S. swept the Games with a 33–2 goal differential, largely thanks to the Boston Fleet players’ invaluable contributions, which led to a lot more attention on the league. 

The U.S. men’s team also won gold for the first time in 46 years (albeit by a smaller margin), and a video quickly leaked of the their team locker room after their victory, in which FBI director Kash Patel was celebrating with them with President Trump on speakerphone, who is congratulating them on their victory and inviting them to the White House. “And we have to, I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team … I do believe I would probably be impeached [if I didn’t invite them],” said the president, making many of the players laugh. This sparked much criticism about the “locker-room culture” of men’s hockey, which is known for being a very conservative sport. Much of this criticism was towards brothers Jack and Quinn Hughes, whose mother won silver at the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) for the U.S. in 1992 and coached the 2026 women’s Olympic team. Only five of the 25 players refused Trump’s invitation. 

This controversy, while incredibly troubling, ultimately benefitted the PWHL’s popularity. Hockey had already been gaining a larger audience, particularly amongst women, because of the incredibly popular show Heated Rivalry, and many of these new fans were disillusioned by the locker room video. When Jack and Quinn Hughes went onstage at SNL alongside Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie, the audience booed, while Hilary Knight and Megan Keller—captain and game-winning goalscorer for the U.S. women’s team, respectively—were met with raucous cheers and laughter. 

The PWHL Takeover Tour quickly followed the Olympics. Teams played at rinks across the country, not just their home ice, in order to gain fans in cities without a team and suss out areas for future expansion teams. In addition, the PWHL, which streams all of its games on YouTube and, with only eight teams and three years of history, has a much lower barrier to entry for new fans. All of this was the perfect recipe for skyrocketing attendance. Every time I had streamed a PWHL game prior to the Olympic break, more than half the seats were empty. When I attended a game afterwards, the stands were filled with screaming fans in Sarah Fillier jerseys. Many stops on the Takeover Tour sold out, including Madison Square Garden with over 18,000 seats.

Due to the PWHL’s age, it’s had the opportunity for some innovative rule changes. One of these changes, the gold plan, aims to fix an issue that has plagued major-league sports for decades: tanking. Typically, the worst teams get the most draft lottery numbers, meaning they have a higher chance at getting a number one draft pick. This encourages teams that won’t make it to playoffs to play poorly towards the end of the season. In the PWHL, teams win three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime win, and one point for an overtime loss in the regular season, and the four teams with the most points make it to playoffs. Once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, however, every point they win counts towards a new point total, and the team with the most post-elimination points gets the first overall draft pick for the following season. The gold plan has been met with a lot of positivity as it keeps teams playing their hardest into the end of the season and fans rooting for their teams after elimination, and some have suggested it be adopted by the National Hockey League (NHL) and other major sports leagues.

In addition, they’ve created new rules for penalties: The “no escape” rule prevents the team on the penalty kill from making active line changes unless there is a stoppage in play, raising the stakes for the penalized team, and the “jailbreak” rule allows teams on the penalty kill to end a power play for a minor penalty if they score a goal, encouraging them to play offensively. 

The PWHL also has more safety regulations than the NHL, with all players required to wear full face coverage, no punching allowed, and no opposite-direction, open-ice checks allowed. Of course, it’s still hockey, so there are still brawls, nasty checks, and shoving, but these regulations grant greater long-term safety for players, with hopefully fewer cases of major injury, though some may argue hockey is a bit less entertaining without the possibility of a fistfight.

Of course, the league is still very young and not even close to perfect. Player salaries, while much better than the NWHL salaries were, still do not come close to the men’s salaries, even with a 1:4 player ratio. This is a common issue with women’s leagues due to their much lower budgets. The PWHL’s minimum salary is $36,050, and its salary cap is $1.3 million, with a requirement that at least six players per team make $80,000 or more per season. During the 2024–25 season, the league’s average annual salary was $56,650, and only nine players made over $100,000. The NHL, comparatively, has an average annual salary of $3.5 million per player and a salary cap of $95.5 million. Its minimum salary is $750,000—around six times greater than the highest-paid PWHL players make.

There is also much less information available about players and news, with most of it communicated through social media and very little covered by traditional sports news sources like ESPN (which categorizes its PWHL articles under the NHL section). When New York Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin changed his mask, there was an article about it at the top of my news feed in less than 12 hours. When New York Sirens forward Taylor Girard fell on the ice and had to be carried off on a stretcher, I scoured for ages trying to find news about her injury, only to find out through a Sirens Instagram post that she would be out for the rest of the season. Even the PWHL app is run entirely by fans, and though they do a great job and their passion is inspiring, it’s frustrating that, in an age where the majority of sports fandom occurs online, there is no official space for information to be compiled, unlike most other sports leagues. 

While the league has been praised for its diversity in terms of queer inclusion, hockey’s racial diversity—and by extension, the PWHL’s—is abysmal. One of the prospective 2026–27 top draft picks, Laila Edwards, will only be the third Black player in the league out of 207 players, in addition to having been the first person of color playing for a U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team, and Japan is the only non-European and non-North American country represented in the league, with only one player.

Throughout May 2026, the locations of four expansion teams for the 2026–27 season have been announced: Detroit, Michigan; Hamilton, Ontario; Las Vegas, Nevada; and San Jose, California. This year, in the interest of player autonomy, the PWHL will not have a traditional expansion draft. Instead, there will be multiple signing windows and free agents will need to be protected, unlike last season. There will be five phases to this process, all of which will have unique contract requirements. Existing teams will still get to protect three players, and a maximum of four players per team with existing contracts can be re-signed. 

Even though the Sirens didn’t make it to playoffs, I’ve still had so much fun watching along this year. With only 30 regular season games per team (as opposed to 82 in the NHL) and every game streaming for free on YouTube, it’s easy to hop on the bandwagon and watch a game or two. Who knows? You might pick up on a couple things in time to be chanting “Wee-woo!” in time for the Sirens’ next season.