The Game Is Getting Bigger

Six Teams Became eight. Eight became twelve. What is making that growth possible?

SIX. EIGHT. TWELVE.

When the Professional Women’s Hockey League begins its 2026–27 season, it will have twice as many teams as it did when the puck dropped on its first game less than three years earlier. Professional sports leagues usually approach expansion cautiously: markets must demonstrate demand, arenas have to work, broadcasters and sponsors must see value, and fans attracted by an opening night eventually have to become repeat customers. Most of all, there have to be enough players capable of keeping the product competitive and entertaining.

Yet the PWHL has moved from its original six teams in Boston, Minnesota, Montréal, New York, Ottawa and Toronto to eight with Vancouver and Seattle, and now to twelve with Detroit, Hamilton, Las Vegas and San Jose joining for 2026–27. The progression tells us the league is growing, but it does not completely explain why. Something else is happening underneath the professional game: women’s hockey itself is getting bigger in Canada, in the United States and increasingly around the world.

Women’s hockey helped create the conditions that made the PWHL possible. Now the league may be reaching the point where its own growth can feed back into the sport beneath it. At the same time, women’s professional leagues in other sports are expanding too — a broader shift we will return to later in this story.

THE NUMBERS UNDERNEATH THE LEAGUE

Start below the professional level. Hockey Canada reported more than 121,000 registered women and girls in 2025–26, surpassing the national record set just one year earlier and representing a five per cent increase in a single season. South of the border, USA Hockey crossed 100,000 registered female players for the first time. When women’s hockey made its Olympic debut in 1998, the United States had roughly 28,000 registered female players.

Those numbers matter because every professional league sits at the top of a development pyramid. A larger base creates the possibility of a larger elite talent pool. For much of women’s hockey history, the problem was not a lack of talented players. It was a lack of places for elite players to continue playing once they reached the highest levels of the game. College hockey provided one destination, national teams another for a very small percentage, and various professional leagues came and went. For many players, the pyramid eventually became extraordinarily narrow. The PWHL is changing its shape.

More than 221,000 registered female players across the two largest North American development systems.

276 JOBS — HOW DEEP IS THE TALENT POOL?

Every expanding league eventually faces the same concern: dilution. A 12-team PWHL with 23 active players per roster creates 276 active professional roster positions, plus 36 reserve positions. More teams mean more jobs, but they also require more elite players. Spread a finite talent pool too widely and the quality of the product can suffer.

The more revealing issue may be how much high-level talent existed beyond the original six-team roster line. Expansion is not creating that talent. It may be revealing players who previously had far fewer opportunities to play professionally at this level.

The 2026 PWHL Draft offers an intriguing clue. A record 236 eligible players declared for only 72 selections, and the pool included 23 players who had competed at the 2026 Olympics representing eight countries. That does not mean every draft-eligible player was ready to step directly into the PWHL, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. It does show that the number of women pursuing professional opportunities extends well beyond the number of roster spots available to be filled from the draft.

Expansion may expose a talent gap, but it may also reveal just how restrictive the previous opportunity structure had been. The difference between some players who already held PWHL jobs and some who did not may be smaller than the old roster limit suggested. For years, making the league defined not only a level of play but also the number of jobs that existed. Twelve teams will give us a much better measure of the depth beneath that line.

THE WORLD IS GETTING CLOSER

Canada and the United States remain the giants of women’s hockey, but the PWHL cannot become the world’s best women’s league by relying forever on only two countries. At the 2025 Women’s World Championship, 18 European players arrived from PWHL teams to represent Czechia, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland; a year earlier there had been six. The league’s player pipeline now reaches through NCAA and U Sports programs as well as European leagues.

That matters because expansion becomes more sustainable if it does more than redistribute the same established North American stars. A larger professional league creates demand for players from more places, while international growth gives more elite players a destination worth pursuing. The next layer of PWHL talent may come not only from a larger Canadian and American pipeline, but from a deeper international one.

FOUR CITIES — FOUR DIFFERENT BETS

The PWHL has not simply pointed at large North American cities and assumed people would buy tickets. Its Takeover Tour effectively turned neutral-site games into market auditions. Vancouver drew 19,038 before receiving a team. Detroit hosted four PWHL games over the league’s first three seasons, culminating with 15,938 at Little Caesars Arena in March 2026 before being awarded a franchise. Hamilton drew 16,012, and the league reported that more than 70 per cent of those ticket buyers were attending their first PWHL game.

The four newest markets also represent different expansion ideas. Hamilton sits in one of the deepest hockey regions in the world and within an enormous girls’ hockey base. Detroit combines traditional hockey culture with demonstrated PWHL demand. Las Vegas asks whether women’s hockey can grow inside a relatively new hockey culture that has already embraced the NHL. San Jose brings an established NHL market, a large youth-hockey ecosystem and a Bay Area sports market that has shown considerable enthusiasm for women’s professional sport.

Those are not four identical bets. Together, they test how existing hockey culture, demonstrated demand, newer hockey markets and broader enthusiasm for women’s professional sport can support the next stage of PWHL growth.

TWELVE TEAMS. CAN THE BALANCE HOLD?

The question is not whether PWHL hockey is good. It is whether a league doubling from six teams to twelve can preserve the competitive balance that helped make its first three seasons entertaining. Expansion can create opportunity and reach, but if the quality of competition falls significantly, attendance milestones and participation statistics will matter much less over time. Fans return because the games give them a reason to come back.

The 2025–26 season offered encouraging evidence of just how competitive the league had become. Five teams were still alive for the final playoff berth on April 11, and Ottawa and Toronto entered the final day of the regular season still fighting for the fourth and final spot. The postseason had established its own unpredictability as well: through that regular season, the lower-seeded team had won every playoff series in PWHL history.

None of that guarantees the same balance in a 12-team league. But, it does establish the standard league expansion has to preserve. If Hamilton, Detroit, Las Vegas and San Jose can build competitive teams while the original eight remain strong, the league will have provided strong evidence that professional-calibre talent extended deeper than the original roster limits allowed us to see.

THE AUDIENCE IS GROWING TOO

Elite women’s hockey already had an audience. The PWHL is beginning to show how much larger that audience might be. The league finished the 2025–26 regular season with more than 1.1 million fans across 120 games and pushed past two million all-time attendees. Merchandise and digital audiences also grew, while the league secured a season-long U.S. national television agreement for 2026–27 and attracted its first outside investors beyond its founding ownership.

Those figures do not guarantee long-term success. Three seasons cannot establish a 30-year business model, and expansion markets still have to become sustainable after the novelty of arrival wears off. But the existence of an audience is no longer the most interesting issue; the scale of that audience is.

MAYBE THE SPORTS FAN IS CHANGING TOO

Hockey is not the only women’s professional sport adding teams. The WNBA is on its own expansion path: Golden State began play in 2025, Toronto and Portland joined in 2026, and Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia have been approved for 2028, 2029 and 2030. That will take the league to 18 teams.

This is not a basketball story, and one league’s growth should not be credited to another. But the timing is worth noticing: more professional women’s teams, more cities, more games, more media inventory and more athletes for fans to follow. As those choices become more visible and accessible, fans have more opportunities to make women’s professional teams part of the sports they already follow.

A family does not have to choose between being Maple Leafs fans and Sceptres fans. A basketball fan does not stop following the NBA because a WNBA team arrives. These can simply become additional sporting options. The important change may be that women’s professional sport is increasingly being presented — and consumed — as part of the regular sports calendar rather than as a separate category asking for room on it.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP

This is where the growth can begin feeding back into itself. Women’s hockey helped create the conditions for the PWHL. A larger, more visible professional league can now help strengthen the sport beneath it by creating more destinations, more local stars and more reasons for young players to see a future in the game.

A girl beginning hockey today in Vancouver, Seattle, Hamilton, Detroit, Las Vegas or San Jose can have a professional women's team in her market. She can attend games, wear a player's jersey, collect her card, watch her on television, follow a playoff race and debate a coaching decision. Her family can build a weekend around going to a PWHL game just as families have done with professional sports for generations.

But for a daughter who plays hockey, there is something else. She can look onto the ice and see athletes like herself occupying a place in mainstream professional sport. The dream no longer has to end with playing for her country or reaching the highest level available to her. There is now a professional league, teams to follow and a draft she can imagine hearing her own name called in someday.

Those experiences sound increasingly ordinary. That is precisely why they matter.

Professional men’s sports have spent generations building emotional connections between fans, families and athletes. The PWHL now has the opportunity to build those same kinds of relationships on a much larger scale. Stars attract fans. Some fans become players. More players deepen the development pool, while stronger participation and visibility give the professional league a broader foundation. That is the feedback loop.

MAYBE THIS ISN'T ONLY ABOUT WOMEN'S SPORTS

That feedback loop may not end with hockey, although this part of the story is harder to measure. A PWHL ticket sold in Hamilton does not automatically create a WNBA television viewer, and someone who follows Marie-Philip Poulin does not necessarily become interested in women's soccer, golf or basketball. There is no simple equation connecting one league's growth to another.

What may be changing is familiarity. For years, women's professional sports faced a difficult business cycle: limited visibility made audiences harder to build, while smaller audiences made broadcasters and investors more cautious about providing greater visibility. Stable leagues, recognizable stars, regular broadcasts and local teams can begin to weaken that cycle.

But perhaps there is another stage beyond familiarity.

As leagues such as the PWHL and WNBA become more established, they have an opportunity to demonstrate something much simpler: this can be compelling professional sports entertainment. A fan does not necessarily have to decide to become a women's sports fan. The decision might eventually become the same one made every night across the sports landscape: What do I want to watch? That would represent a significant change. Instead of women's professional leagues competing primarily for a particular segment of the sports audience, they increasingly compete for the same attention, ticket dollars, television time and sponsorship money as everyone else.

Consider a league such as the NLL trying to expand its place on the North American sports landscape. Its competition for the next fan is not limited to other men's leagues. A potential customer deciding how to spend a Saturday night might choose an NHL game, an NLL game, a PWHL game, a WNBA game or something else entirely. The same is increasingly true for broadcasters, sponsors and advertisers deciding where to invest.

That does not mean gender becomes irrelevant. The visibility of women competing at the highest level remains especially meaningful to girls who can now see themselves represented in mainstream professional sport. But perhaps success eventually changes the larger conversation from men's sports versus women's sports to something much simpler:

Is this a sport people want to watch?

If that happens, the PWHL's significance could extend beyond the growth of women's hockey. It would be another indication that a part of the sporting world some traditional fans may have overlooked is increasingly competing for its share of the mainstream sports audience.

THE NEXT TEST

Growth still brings real tests. Participation has to continue, young players have to remain in the game, the international talent pool needs to deepen and twelve teams have to maintain a standard of hockey that keeps fans coming back. Detroit, Hamilton, Las Vegas and San Jose need to become lasting hockey communities rather than successful opening nights, and the economics eventually have to work.

Getting from six teams to twelve may prove easier than deciding when — or whether — to go from twelve to fourteen, sixteen or beyond. Those are the questions a growing professional league should eventually face. Not long ago, the central issue was whether a stable, well-capitalized elite women’s league could take root. Now the discussion is about the depth of a 12-team talent pool, the strength of four new markets, the international pipeline and how much larger the league might eventually become. That is quite a change in the conversation.

THE GAME IS GETTING BIGGER

There is a temptation to tell this story as though the PWHL arrived and created a women’s hockey boom. That gives the league too much credit. The players were already coming. Girls’ hockey programs were already growing. College programs were already developing elite players. Canada and the United States had spent decades building one of international hockey’s great rivalries. European countries were improving, and Olympic hockey had given generations of girls something to watch and something to chase. All of that helped make the PWHL possible.

Women’s hockey helped create the conditions for the PWHL. Now the PWHL has an opportunity to return the favour. At a scale previous development systems and professional leagues could not provide on their own, it can offer a visible, stable professional destination in more markets. Six teams became eight, and eight became twelve. There are more professional jobs, more markets, more televised games, more jerseys, more hockey cards, more local heroes and more opportunities for a young player to look at someone on the ice and imagine herself there someday.

Maybe the next great PWHL player is already skating in an under-11 program somewhere in Ontario, Minnesota, Sweden or California. Perhaps another young girl sitting beside her at a PWHL game does not become a hockey player at all. Maybe she becomes a basketball player, a soccer player, a golfer — or simply a sports fan who grows up seeing female professional athletes not as an exception, but as part of the sporting landscape.

That broader effect is harder to measure than registrations, attendance or television audiences. It may also be one of the most interesting possibilities of all. The PWHL does not need to carry the growth of women’s sport on its shoulders. Its first responsibility is to build a compelling, sustainable hockey league. But if doing that also makes elite women’s sport more visible, more familiar and more ordinary in the best possible sense, its influence may extend beyond the rink.

The game is getting bigger. The next few seasons should tell us more about how deep the talent is, how large the audience can become — and just how much bigger the game can get.