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Will the PWHL’s Aggressive Expansion Succeed?
After just three seasons, the PWHL has expanded to 12 teams. The professional women’s hockey league is gaining four new markets in San Jose, Las Vegas, Detroit, and Hamilton, Ont. The franchises will join the eight existing clubs for the upcoming 2026–27 season.
It took the NHL 50 years to go from 4 to 12 teams between 1917 to 1967. The WNBA got to 12 teams in just two years, but six of the league’s teams folded by 2009. The NWSL spent nine years getting to 12 teams from 2013 to 2022.
Compared to these other leagues, the PWHL is expanding at breakneck pace.
But the league feels its speedy growth is justified and well timed. “The decision to expand is a direct response to the demand we’ve seen for the PWHL,” a league spokesperson tells Front Office Sports. Adding four teams now, it says, strengthens “the league’s long-term foundation.”
While expansion GMs are also confident, some questions and potential obstacles still linger, particularly around rosters and attendance. When the new teams hit the ice in November, the answers to those questions will be major markers for whether the rapid-expansion gamble is paying off.
Talent Factor
The four GMs of the league’s new teams are confident there’s enough talent to sustain 104 new roster spots.
“The level of play in the PWHL has put pressure on the NCAA to continue to develop their players and make sure that they’re ready,” PWHL Hamilton GM Meghan Duggan said in a May 28 press conference. “There’s no shortage of talent that’s ready to play and compete in this league.”
Detroit GM Manon Rhéaume and San Jose GM Troy Ryan both said the league’s 2026 draft class is particularly strong, and can infuse more talent into the league. This group, which saw a record 236 players declare, includes five skaters on the gold medal–winning 2026 U.S. Olympic team.
Kyle Cushman, a hockey editor for The Score, agrees. He tells FOS that the talent pool is the “least of [his] concerns” about expansion, despite there being just 45 Division I NCAA women’s hockey teams and no developmental leagues like there are on the men’s side.
Cushman says that in 2019, when the now-defunct National Women’s Hockey League and Canadian Women’s Hockey League were the main professional avenues for women’s hockey players, the leagues combined for 11 teams. He considers it proof that women’s pro hockey could succeed with 12 teams.
“If the goal is just [to have] the most competitive teams, then the NHL would still be at six teams,” Cushman says. “That’s not necessarily the goal all the time … I think 12 teams consistently has been that number for women’s hockey.”
Regarding rosters, his biggest worry is that turnover could make it difficult for new fans to quickly latch onto teams and stars. Four new teams have just a few months to acquire new players, and current teams could lose their stars in a complex, six-phase expansion process. He says many hockey fans are used to the roster continuity of the NHL and the longer—and less jarring—timeline of league expansion.
However, Cushman recalls a conversation he had with Goldeneyes alternate captain Sarah Nurse, who said that the league was still in its “growth phase,” and that turnover simply comes with that territory.
Getting Fans in Seats
Building and sustaining attendance for the new teams will also be a key factor in determining how fast is too fast.
To be sure, attendance is way up in the PWHL’s third year. The league averaged 9,304 fans this past regular season. (It’s not far off the WNBA’s average attendance of about 11,000 and the NWSL’s roughly 10,000.) The two newest teams, Seattle and Vancouver, both averaged more than 10,000 in home attendance. Not every franchise has seen such high numbers—the Sirens, for instance, brought in only an average of 4,109 fans, though their attendance was up the most of any team year-over-year.
The four expansion teams are playing in arenas that all seat more than 17,000 people—a target in line with the goal of 10,000-plus capacity venues, according to PWHL advisory board member Stan Kasten. Whether they’ll pull in numbers more similar to Seattle and Vancouver versus New York will be telling about the rapid expansion push.
The league may hit some growing pains on the heels of such quick expansion, but the PWHL tells FOS it’s well aware of that. “Building a sustainable league is a long-term process, and when the demand is there, it’s important to continue investing in growth through expansion,” the spokesperson says.
“The league is responding to the success and the interest of the PWHL, from the takeover tours to the eyeballs that the Olympics had on women’s hockey,” Las Vegas GM Dominique DiDia said of expansion. “The fact that there’s going to be a team in the southwest is something that the fans are hungry for.”
Mark Walter’s Money
Even with expansion, the PWHL remains a single-entity league, where all 12 teams are owned and operated by Mark Walter, who also owns the Lakers and Dodgers.
The single-entity ownership model has been an advantage for the nascent PWHL. Without the possible complication of ownership disputes, experts tell FOS, the league is able to expand quickly.
“If you’re doing a takeover tour and you have six to eight different owners, then you’re taking one home gate revenue away and putting it into this different building,” Cushman says. “Single ownership has been a big benefit to the league, just having everybody pushing in the same direction.”
Notably, five of the six WNBA teams that folded in the league’s heyday did so after changing ownership or remaining unsold after old owners tried unloading their teams.
But at some point, sports attorney Irwin Kishner predicts, the PWHL will sell off its teams as individually-owned franchises. (The Premier Lacrosse League, also single-entity at the moment, is planning for the same eventual move.)
“That’s probably why they’re doing four teams [this year], because there’s only one source of ownership,” says Kishner, who has advised team acquisitions and sales across the four major North American men’s pro sports leagues. “But to get to the level of competition and excellence they’re looking to get to, you want to have multiple owners.”
When the 2026–27 season begins, ownership conversations will take the backseat as all eyes will be on whether the league can navigate its most ambitious expansion effort to date.
“There’s an appetite for it—there’s people above me that are making decisions that feel like women’ sports is ready for this many teams,” Hamilton GM Duggan said. “Why not be unconventional, push the envelope a little bit?”
The post Will the PWHL’s Aggressive Expansion Succeed? appeared first on Front Office Sports.
