For new fans of women’s hockey, PWHL offers drama, storylines to follow post-Olympics

The Professional Women’s Hockey League is back up and running after its Olympic break with more eyes on the sport than ever before.

That isn’t hyperbole. The women’s hockey gold medal game between the U.S. and Canada averaged 5.3 million views in the United States, becoming the most-watched women’s hockey game on record, according to NBC. In Canada, 4.2 million watched the final minutes as the U.S. went on to win 2-1 in overtime.

Many of the players featured in that game — including Megan Keller, who scored the golden goal for Team USA — returned from Milan to their PWHL teams and have been playing in front of thousands of fans, with many more watching on television.

In the past, before the PWHL launched in January 2024, a pro league for all the best players was never part of the equation.

“We’ve never come back from the Olympics and hopped right into a league — we (used to) come back and our fans don’t get to watch us play anymore, or they have to wait until the next worlds, the next Olympics,” said Keller in an interview with The Athletic.

“It’s just a great time for women’s hockey and hockey in general to bring more fans into our sport and our league.”

If you’re one of the newly minted fans that Keller is talking about and you haven’t paid super close attention to the PWHL season thus far, it’s OK. The Athletic is here to help.

Here’s everything you need to know about the PWHL.

What is the PWHL?

Let’s start with the basics. The PWHL is the newest women’s professional hockey league in North America — and the third to launch 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 franchises: the inaugural six in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, Minnesota and New York, and 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’d typically see in other major pro sports leagues such as the NHL, NFL and MLB.

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 opted for a number of changes from a typical pro hockey rulebook.

Teams earn points with a 3-2-1 points system instead of the standard 2-1-0 that the NHL has used. In the PWHL, regulation wins are worth the most at three points, while overtime and shootout wins earn two points. A loss in overtime or the shootout results in one point, and a regulation loss is worth nothing.

At the end of the regular season, the four teams with the most points move on to the playoffs.

The league introduced a “jailbreak” rule in 2024: If a team scores short-handed, they get to free their player — who is serving the minor penalty — from the penalty box. Last year, the PWHL also debuted a “no escape” rule, which means when a team takes a penalty, players on the ice must stay out for the first penalty-kill faceoff, rather than letting coaches immediately put out their top penalty killers. The rule led to a 3 percent increase in power play efficiency last season.

In 2025-26, the league only made minor tweaks. Teams are now required to have three goalies on their roster — Minnesota carried two at one point last season — and there will be no more coaches’ challenges for video review. All reviews will now be initiated by the league, either via on-ice officials or the situation room.

The other big difference in the PWHL is how it determines its entry draft order. Instead of a lottery system — such as the kind used by the NHL and other leagues — that awards the best odds at selecting first overall to the worst teams, the PWHL uses the “Gold Plan.”

The concept goes like 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 be awarded the first overall pick in the draft. The second non-playoff team will have the second overall pick. Playoff teams will select three through six based on the inverse order of the regular-season standings.

Where to find stars from the Olympics

Sixty-one PWHL players — 30 percent of the entire league — competed in the Milan Olympics, including Canada’s entire 23-player roster and 16 players from the United States.

Keller and Aerin Frankel, Team USA’s star goalie, both play on the Boston Fleet, alongside Finnish forward Susanna Tapani and Swiss star Alina Müller, who scored the bronze medal-winning goal against Sweden.

Taylor Heise, who assisted Keller’s golden goal, plays for the Minnesota Frost with U.S. teammates Kendall Coyne Schofield — who is on long-term injured reserve — Lee Stecklein, Kelly Pannek, Grace Zumwinkle and Britta Curl-Salemme.

American captain Hilary Knight plays for the Seattle Torrent, but is currently on LTIR and recently revealed she played through the Olympics with a torn MCL. Her Seattle teammates include Alex Carpenter, Hannah Bilka, Cayla Barnes and Canadian forward Julia Gosling.

Team USA’s back-up goalie Gwyneth Philips is among the best in the PWHL for the Ottawa Charge.

Canada’s captain Marie-Philip Poulin plays for the Montreal Victoire with Laura Stacey, Erin Ambrose, Kati Tabin, No. 1 goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens and American forward Hayley Scamurra.

Daryl Watts, who led Canada in scoring in her first Olympics, plays for the Toronto Sceptres, with eight other Olympians, including Emma Maltais, Renata Fast, Natalie Spooner and Blayre Turnbull.

Nobody on Canada had more goals than Sarah Fillier, who plays for the New York Sirens, with Kristin O’Neill, who scored Canada’s lone goal in the gold medal game.

The full list of PWHL Olympians can be found here.

Storylines to watch

Three-peat watch

The Minnesota Frost have won the PWHL’s first two Walter Cup championships.

After the league’s expansion devastated rosters – each team lost four players in the draft and more during free agency as players opted to sign in Vancouver and Seattle — some wondered if Minnesota could compete this season without some of its top forwards (Michela Cava) and defenders (Sophie Jaques and Claire Thompson).

But the Frost have largely picked up where they left off. No team has scored more goals than Minnesota (51), which sits third in the league standings. Heise leads the PWHL in points (19) with Curl-Salemme and Coyne Schofield also in the top five. Nicole Hensley is third among goalies with a 1.85 goals against average and 0.937 save percentage. And, in the absence of offensive defenders in Jaques and Thompson, rookie Kendall Cooper and sophomore Mae Batherson have stepped up to pace the Frost blue line.

As they’ve shown over the last two years, all the Frost need to do is get into the playoffs to make some waves.

Will the New York Sirens finally turn things around?

After finishing at the bottom of the PWHL standings in back-to-back seasons, New York general manager Pascal Daoust retooled the roster, giving the Sirens a younger look in 2025-26.

The Sirens selected Czech forward Kristýna Kaltounková with the No. 1 pick in the draft — after adding Fillier at No. 1 last season. Daoust also traded forward Abby Roque to the Montreal Victoire in exchange for O’Neill, and No. 1 defender Ella Shelton to the Toronto Sceptres for the No. 3 pick in the 2025 draft, which turned into Patty Kazmaier winner Casey O’Brien.

As of Wednesday morning, the Sirens hold the fourth and final playoff spot, with Fillier, Kaltounková and O’Brien leading the offense. Nobody in the PWHL has more goals than Kaltounková, either.

There’s still a lot of hockey left to be played, but the fact that the Sirens are playing meaningful hockey in March is a dramatic improvement from the last two years. The team also just beat Ottawa — the fifth-place team in the league — in a massive 6-2 win in front of 8,264 fans — the largest home crowd in team history — on Sunday, which could prove to be a key springboard down the stretch.

The race for Caroline Harvey

The 2026 PWHL Draft class is stacked with elite talent — none better than Olympic MVP Caroline Harvey, who is finishing her senior season at the University of Wisconsin.

The defender co-led all players in scoring at the Olympics and is already one of the very best offensive defenders in the game. And the team that wins the PWHL’s “Gold Plan” will earn the right to select her first-overall in the entry draft.

No teams have officially been eliminated from playoff contention; however, the Seattle Torrent and Vancouver Goldeneyes are currently sitting at the bottom of the standings. The league’s two expansion teams looked incredible on paper after poaching top players from the inaugural six franchises, but have yet to achieve consistent results this season.

A few regulation wins could get either team out of the basement, but for now, they look to be in a fight for Harvey with the sixth-place Toronto Sceptres and fifth-place Ottawa Charge.

The teams that miss out on Harvey will still have options with American Olympians Abbey Murphy, Laila Edwards — the first Black woman to play for Team USA at the Olympics, who can play forward and defense — Kirsten Simms, and Tessa Janecke, all expected to enter the PWHL draft.

Where will the league expand to next?

According to executive vice president of business operations Amy Scheer, the league will add two to four teams, going from eight franchises to as many as 12 by next season.

Scheer told Front Office Sports that “if we could work on the timeline that we did last year, that would be great,” meaning expansion teams could be announced before the end of the regular season in April.

There are plenty of options for the PWHL to choose from for its second wave of expansion, and the league’s “Takeover Tour” should once again prove to be a solid testing ground. Vancouver and Seattle each hosted neutral-site games last season and made successful pitches to secure the league’s first expansion franchises.

This year’s 16-stop installment has featured several massive — and sometimes record-breaking — crowds in cities such as Halifax, Quebec City, Washington, D.C., and Denver.

Detroit has long appeared to be a front-runner for expansion and will host its fourth neutral site game at Little Caesars Arena on March 28. After breaking the U.S. record for attendance in January, Washington now looks like an excellent choice as well.

If players had their way, according to The Athletic’s women’s hockey player poll, the next wave of expansion would include Detroit, Denver, Chicago and Edmonton.

How to watch

In Canada, broadcast rights for all 120 PWHL games this season have been split between TSN and RDS, CBC/Radio-Canada, Sportsnet and Prime Video.

In the United States, games are free to watch on YouTube and have been available regionally, with some national U.S. partners — such as FOX and Paramount — televising games. 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 dates

March 30: Trade deadline

March 31: Roster freeze date

April 25: PWHL regular season ends

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