With the feud over, the new women’s ice hockey league begins
Now that a long-running dispute in professional women’s ice hockey has been settled, a new competition featuring many of the world’s best players is set to begin in January. The first hometown and other details were announced Tuesday.
The six teams in the new Professional Women’s Hockey League will be split evenly between the United States and Canada, with teams in Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, the New York metropolitan area, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. Team nicknames and arenas have yet to be determined.
“The journey to get us here has been long and complicated,” said Jayna Hefford, a five-time Olympian for Canada and the new league’s senior vice-president of hockey operations.
The top women’s hockey league from 2015 to 2023 was the Premier Hockey Federation, originally called the National Women’s Hockey League. It struggled to achieve the level of success of other top men’s and women’s professional leagues in North America. Low salaries meant players often had to work second jobs, and television coverage was not prominent.
Dissatisfied with the league’s progress, members of the players’ union, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association, are boycotting the league starting with the 2019-2020 season. Among the hundreds of players who took part in the strike were almost all the top names from the US and Canadian Olympic teams. That left the women’s league with second-tier players and few of the names fans might recognize.
The players’ union was considering setting up its own league and the teams it put together played exciting matches in both countries, competing with the PHF.
The PHF made progress and raised the salary cap to $750,000 per team in his final season and lured a few players back. But the vast majority of them never returned.
In June, the union and the PHF agreed to merge, with the intention of starting a new league, owned by the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises. Players have ratified a collective bargaining agreement for the future and all PHF contracts have been annulled.
Each team in the new league can sign three players as free agents in a 15-round draft on September 18. The final rosters will include 23 active players. The league says six players on each team will receive three-year contracts worth at least $80,000 per year, while most other players will receive one- or two-year contracts.
For the first season, each team will play 24 regular-season games beginning in January 2024. The league says subsequent seasons will begin in November and will consist of 32 games. Expansion is also possible in the future, the company said.
In its final season the PHF had teams in Boston; Buffalo; Simsbury, Conn.; East Rutherford, NJ; Richfield, Minn.; Montreal; and Toronto. With the start of the new league, Buffalo and Connecticut will lose their teams, while Ottawa will gain one.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has said his league was reluctant to get involved in women’s hockey while the split remains in place. Stan Kasten, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who serves on the new league’s board of governors, said the NHL has offered advice.
“The NHL has been fantastic in supporting us,” he said.
The NHL will work with the new league to host games at neutral sites in both NHL and non-NHL cities outside of the six home sites.
“No fan owes us their time or money,” Kasten said. “It’s up to us to earn it.”
