For the first time in the short history of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), the Walter Cup is leaving the United States. The Montreal Victoire beat the Ottawa Charge in an all-Canadian final that wrapped up Wednesday night in four games. While Canada can claim the champion, it’s the US that continues to win in the growth of women’s hockey.
The day before Montreal won the Walter Cup, the PWHL announced the league is expanding to San Jose for next season. It was the fourth such expansion announcement in the three weeks. With Detroit, Las Vegas and Hamilton, Ontario, receiving the other three expansion franchises, the young league will head into the 2026/27 season with an imbalance in franchises between Canada and the US for the first time.
The PWHL will enter its fourth campaign with seven US franchises and five Canadian. It’s a business decision, but it’s also a reflection of the monumental growth the sport is experiencing in the US.
The PWHL is riding record attendance in venues across the US and is hoping to arrive at a league-wide national US broadcasting deal. ION, the national sports network of Scripps Sports, aired a PWHL game nationally on linear television for the first time in the US in March. After that game, the network added the PWHL playoffs to its docket. Prior to the deal, the PWHL was only available in the US on regional networks, and free on YouTube. Even on YouTube however, the league saw a 77% season-over-season increase in viewership.
At the box office, the PWHL sold out Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, Boston’s TD Garden and New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The MSG attendance of 18,006 now sits as the US professional women’s hockey attendance record. League-wide, attendance flourished, but the bulk of the growth occurred through last year’s expansion teams in Seattle and Vancouver, as well as in the league’s original three American markets.
The Seattle Torrent led the league in attendance drawing an average of 12,875 fans per game, but there was growth across the board. The Minnesota Frost saw their average attendance climb from 6,524 in 2024/25 to 8,143 this season; the Boston Fleet grew from 4,587 to 5,991; and the New York Sirens nearly doubled their average attendance from a paltry 2,764 last season, to a respectable 5,095 in the 2025/26 campaign.
Coupled with the fact that the PWHL increased its league and team partnership portfolio by 35% season-over-season to 81 corporate partners, saw in-arena merchandise sales double and online merchandise sales increase more than 50%, business is booming for the PWHL.
Parallel to the league’s on- and off-ice success is the success of women’s ice hockey in America. In the past year on the international stage, Team USA won women’s hockey gold at the U-18 world championships, IIHF world championships, Para Ice Hockey world championships and the Milano Cortina Olympics.
Following the US team’s Olympic gold medal, USA Hockey announced it had hit a new milestone, with 100,000 women and girls registered to play ice hockey for the first time. That growth has accelerated exponentially in places the PWHL will now call home. In Nevada, since the Vegas Golden Knights joined the NHL in 2017, girls’ hockey registrations have risen by 600%. That number will surely climb even more rapidly after PWHL expansion to Las Vegas.
The league will also lay roots in California for the first time in San Jose, where the new PWHL team will share the SAP Center with the San Jose Sharks. The San Jose Jr Sharks minor hockey program now has many women’s hockey alumnae competing in the NCAA and professionally. There are even several Bay Area products who will look to join the PWHL this season through free agency or the draft, including San Jose native Rachel Llanes, who spent the past three seasons as the strength and conditioning coach for the AHL’s San Jose Barracudas, the top farm team of the NHL’s Sharks.
The league’s move to California makes sense given the state’s ties to the PWHL itself. The PWHL operates under a single-entity ownership model, with all, now 12, franchises owned by the Mark Walter Group. Walter is also the owner of MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
PWHL Advisory Board members Billie Jean King, Ilona Kloss, Stan Kasten and Royce Cohen also all run through California. Kasten is the part-owner and president of the Dodgers, and part-owner of the Sparks. King is an investor in the NWSL’s Angel City, and she was born and raised in Long Beach, California. And Cohen is the senior vice-president of business strategy for the Dodgers.
While the Walter Cup, named for the league’s founder and his wife, is headed north of the border, business, by every metric, is booming for the PWHL in the United States.
