No doubt we’ll see an improved version of the PWHL in Year 2.
Every team got better, boosted by a highly talented draft class and existing rosters having learned a year’s worth of lessons. All the teams have names and identities now. There are more games — 30, up from 24 — and more markets involved.
They didn’t make major tweaks to the operation, and want to be careful of their next steps, but those in women’s hockey got a taste of success and want more, more, more.
“Obviously, the first season exceeded all our expectations,” said Jayna Hefford, the PWHL’s senior vice president of hockey operations. “For many of us who have been in the game for so long, it’s emotional to think about where the game has come from, where we’ve come to. We spent a lot of time reading the research that suggests the time is now and the fandom is there … we always believed it to be true.
“We had a vision for it. To see it happen as quickly as it did was something that was pretty special.”
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Onward … with an eye on five factors that are top of mind for the PWHL entering Year 2:
Expanding horizons
The top talking point of the offseason, after the logos: expansion. The PWHL appears to be on track to add two teams next year, though every time that prospect is raised, the league throws water on it.
“We may add two teams. We may add zero,” said Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior vice president of business operations. “The goal is to expand at the rate the hockey talent can support.”
But the league intends to plant its flag in new markets, via its Takeover Tour run of neutral-site games.
The PWHL is heading to Buffalo, Denver, Detroit, Edmonton, Quebec City, Raleigh, N.C., St. Louis, Seattle, and Vancouver for neutral-site games. All are potential spots for expansion, as are “several handfuls of others,” Scheer said.
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“I think every city that has an interest in us is under consideration,” she said. “We have to want them, and they have to want us, and everything has to be right in the relationship.”
Physicality and game play
Essentially, the PWHL uses the NHL’s rulebook, albeit with penalties for body checking. But there were bodies flying around the league last season, and teams didn’t shy away from checking.
The league wants to eliminate “the big, open-ice, opposite-direction contact,” Hefford said, “with players skating directly at each other and not playing the puck.” But hard puck battles are encouraged. If that means one player smacks another into the boards, so be it.
The league enters Year 2 with a better grasp on where the line is with regard to the rough stuff.
“I think we’re trying to figure it out,” Boston Fleet coach Courtney Kessel said. “The speed, the pace of the game, and physicality of it is so exciting. The fans love it.
“Our players learned how to take a hit, give a hit, roll off hits, and make a play from it. That’s the next step heading into this season.”
We’re about one and a half generations into the era of industrialized, pro-quality training for women’s hockey players. The skill level has never been higher. Also, many of today’s top players mostly competed against girls growing up, with no body contact allowed.
Teaching it properly was “something we really honed in on,” Hefford said. Last month, a camp was held in Denver with most of the 65 officials, and former Anaheim Ducks captain Ryan Getzlaf, now working in the NHL’s player safety department, taught body-checking clinics in the league’s multi-team camps in Montreal and Toronto.
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Elsewhere on the player safety front, any head contact is now an automatic five-minute major, pending review.
Tweaks to address scoring included a “no escape rule,” which mandates a penalized team cannot change lines before starting the kill.
Where to plant its flag
Beyond figuring out which cities should host games and franchises, the PWHL has decisions to make in its business partnerships.
Some are easy choices — linking forces with Barbie, for sentimental reasons, was a hit last season — and some are less so. Few will be inspired by the Fleet’s jersey patch sponsor, which is an inhaler company.
The PWHL wants to lead a women’s sports boom, and offer something for everyone: diehards in their 60s, girls, families, millennials, Gen Z’ers. Whom it connects with to tell that side of its story will be telling.
The PWHL is a hot property in hockey. EA Sports added all six teams and the Walter Cup to its NHL25 franchise.
“We’ve made it to the mainstream,” Scheer said. “It’s another important benchmark that just tells us, right time, right place. There are women’s hockey fans out there. We belong.”
TV deals and accessibility
Asked how the PWHL can earn a greater share of the North American sports consciousness, Boston forward Kelly Babstock had a quick answer: “Just keep putting us on TV.”
The league is keeping its options open, going for short-term, multipronged media rights deals.
In Canada, that means some combination of TSN, CBC, Radio-Canada (French), and Amazon Prime will carry all 90 regular-season games and the playoffs (which will be produced in-house). The league said its deal is for the 2024-25 season, so the TV talk is not going away.
As of Tuesday, the league had not declared its US TV coverage beyond confirming that MSG and NESN will return as New York and Boston broadcasters, and all US and international (except Canada) games will be available on YouTube.
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The latter is sure to irritate some Canadian fans who were getting the product for free. “It’s a hard decision because accessibility is important,” Scheer said. “On the flip side, you hope fans realize it is a very important next step for the sustainability and growth of our league.”
Ticket prices for Fleet games range from $22.50 to $62.50, plus fees. For most Bruins home games, the get-in price is double what on-the-glass seats in Lowell would cost. The teams promise to bring more and better merchandise — names and logos certainly help those efforts — after fans complained of the lack of availability in Year 1.
The Tsongas Center (capacity: 6,500) is one of the lower-attended buildings in the league, not including Toronto and Montreal. Fleet general manager Danielle Marmer said the season-ticket base more than doubled, from about 600 last season to about 1,500.
“Tsongas is the right size for the Fleet today,” Scheer said, “but that doesn’t mean we aren’t having conversations with other facilities.
“The Bruins have also been wonderful partners for us in Boston. Of course we would like to play a game at TD Garden one year, and hopefully we will. We’ve had those conversations with the Bruins. Just need to find the right time.”
Player development and roster building
There are six teams, with 23 players per team and three reserve slots. The majority of those players wound up signing contracts and playing in games last season. But a large class of ex-pros who played in previous leagues opted to move on from hockey.
Adding 52 new players — two expansion teams’ worth — to a pool of 156 will have a dilutive effect. It will attract more players from the SDHL in Sweden, considered the second-best league in the world. If the NCAA is the PWHL’s de facto development league, the SDHL is the second-best option for players who don’t make the cut here.
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“They’ve made tremendous strides even since I started playing there back in 2017-18,” said Boston defender Sidney Morin, who spent her first four years out of college in Sweden. “Players are being treated even better. They’re watching this league develop and taking some of those things into their own league.
“There’s a lot of quality European players and girls from college that don’t feel they’re quite ready. They have the physicality over there as well, so I think it’s a great starting point.”
Hefford acknowledged the PWHL would like to have its own development system, but building that will take time.
As the PWHL showed, financial investment, passion, and drive can get an entity off the ground faster than expected.
“I think we did a tremendous job to get to this position,” Fleet captain Hilary Knight said. “The first year is going to have bumps along the way, and needs people to navigate it. Now it feels like all of us are players.
“We went from the negotiating committee to just players now, which is really exciting.”
Matt Porter can be reached at matthew.porter@globe.com. Follow him @mattyports.