This past New Year’s Day, the PWHL (Professional Women’s Hockey League) kicked off its inaugural season, showing the world that the market for professional women’s sports will be a powerhouse in the coming years.
The PWHL is made up of six teams that are based in hockey’s most popular cities, states, and provinces throughout the continent. Minnesota, New York, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Boston are the cities that make up the PWHL teams. The rosters on each of these teams are designated to have more hometown hockey players playing for them. The amount of passion in the PWHL is rivaled by no other professional sports league in the world.
Hockey is the fastest-growing game in the world right now, and the PWHL has made it grow even more. Within the first days of ticket sales for the PWHL, all tickets were sold out in every arena across the world. Team Minnesota actually ended up expanding the number of seats in the Xcel Energy Center they were offering, which sold out again.
This league has effectively changed the world, especially for young girls who will grow up in a world where they can become professional athletes on a scale larger than any other sport—through hockey. Social media has been flooded with videos of mothers sharing videos of their daughters watching women pave the way for professional sports in the future. The game is the same fast-paced game we see in the NHL.
However, with the passion of the PWHL’s athletes, it has become some of the most entertaining and fast hockey to watch on television this year. You can catch all of the games on FuboTV and on local sports channels. If you live in an area or state without a team, the PWHL will be streaming all of their games on YouTube as well.
The PWHL has established its own set of rules and regulations for the league. “The PWHL has embraced the opportunity to be innovative with how our game is played,” Senior Vice President of Hockey Jayna Hefford said via Yahoo Sports. The new rules include changes to shootouts and penalty kills. In a shootout in the NHL, each player can only shoot once until everyone has shot. The PWHL has changed this rule so any player can shoot at any turn during the shootout. The PWHL has also made changes to how the shootout plays out. In the NHL, a shootout happens in three rounds, where a player from each team takes a shot, and whoever scores more goals wins. If both teams score the same amount of goals throughout the three rounds, there is a tie, and the shootout will move into a sudden death format where if you score and the goal is unanswered, then your team wins. In the PWHL, the shoutouts will consist of five rounds before moving into the same sudden death format that the NHL has. The rule change to the penalty kill is that if you can manage to score a short-handed goal while you are killing a penalty, your player will be released from the penalty box. This will create a new drive to score goals while killing the penalty. It will make the end of games especially interesting because teams who are down a goal with a penalty will be rushing to score a goal so they can get back to even strength.
The PWHL has implemented a new point system in the standings too. They are choosing to give out three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime or shootout win, and one point for a shootout or overtime loss. This will eliminate a problem that other pro levels of hockey have, where you can play for overtime because you get the same amount of points as a win if you lose in overtime. This will make regulation wins matter the most.
In the league standings, Minnesota is currently in first place with an undefeated record of 3-0, while on the other side of things, Boston is bringing up the rear, having gone 0-1 after the first week of play. Minnesota’s Grace Zumwinkle leads the league in goals and points with four goals. Also from Minnesota, Maddie Rooney is leading the league in save percentage with an impressive 1.000 after her 24-save shutout against Montreal. We’re one week into the PWHL, and it’s already proven to be some of the best hockey played in the world right now. It’s going to be an exciting season for these hockey players as we progress throughout the year.
