The PWHL will add expansion teams in Hamilton and Las Vegas ahead of next season, the latest step in the league’s rapid expansion plan.
Hamilton and Las Vegas will bring the three-year-old league to 11 teams, with another location likely to be added in the days to come. Detroit was announced as the ninth PWHL team last week.
It comes as the league targets a major U.S. broadcast rights deal and more corporate partnerships, something the league’s leaders believe will be easier to do with 12 teams instead of eight.
Hamilton drew more than 16,000 fans to a game between the Toronto Sceptres and Seattle Torrent in January at TD Coliseum, where the PWHL team will play its home games.
Seventy per cent of the people who came to January’s game in Hamilton were attending their first PWHL game, the league’s data showed. That helped give the league confidence that a Hamilton team won’t siphon fans from the Sceptres, which play in downtown Toronto at Coca-Cola Coliseum.
“Hamilton and its surrounding communities have long been central to the growth of girls’ and women’s hockey, producing generations of talented players and passionate fans,” Jayna Hefford, the PWHL’s executive vice president of hockey operations, said in a statement.
“This is a region with deep hockey roots, and the response we saw during our Takeover Tour game at TD Coliseum made it clear that fans in the region are ready to rally around a team of their own.”
The city “boasts one of the largest and most concentrated areas in the world for girls’ hockey participation” and will look to draw fans from nearby Ontario communities, such as Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, the Niagara region and London. Sarah Nurse, Renata Fast and Emma Maltais are among the most notable PWHL players from the Hamilton area.
But the biggest advantage Hamilton had in the process was a newly-renovated arena with space for another professional tenant.
TD Coliseum will also be home to an American Hockey League team next season, but there’s no NHL team to schedule around. Oak View Group, which operates TD Coliseum, worked with the PWHL to bring a team to Hamilton.
A Hamilton team brings the number of Canadian PWHL teams to five, joining Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver.
Betting on Vegas
Las Vegas, meanwhile, is new territory for the PWHL. The league has never played a game there.
Placing a team in Las Vegas is a bet on the growth of girls’ and women’s hockey in the area, following the success of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights. The team will play out of the Golden Knights’ home at T-Mobile Arena.
Since the Knights’ first season in 2017, participation in hockey among girls and women has grown by 600 per cent, according to the PWHL. But those numbers are still quite small compared to most areas of Canada. USA Hockey’s data shows 532 women or girls were registered to play hockey in Nevada in the 2024-25 season.
The city has attracted several new professional sports teams over the last few years. The league also pointed to the success of the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, which drew an average of more than 11,500 fans during the last regular season, according to data compiled by the Across the Timeline website.
“From the staggering growth of youth hockey participation to the passionate support for the Golden Knights and Aces, the Las Vegas community has enthusiastically embraced both hockey and women’s sports,” Amy Scheer, the league’s executive vice president of business operations, said.
“While professional women’s hockey may be new to the market, we know Las Vegas is ready to welcome and champion a PWHL team of its own.”
It will be the first PWHL team in the American southwest, which should help ease some of the difficult travel teams in Vancouver and Seattle experienced this past season. The Associated Press has reported that the league is considering splitting teams into two conferences.
The league opted for Las Vegas over more established hockey markets that could likely sell more tickets, but it’s a long-term play for a league that was created under a single-entity ownership structure.
All 11 teams in the league, including the new teams in Hamilton and Las Vegas, are owned by The Walter Group.
The bid for a team in Las Vegas was supported by the Golden Knights and MGM Resorts International, which is a joint venture owner of T-Mobile Arena.
PWHL executives Jayna Hefford and Amy Scheer chat with CBC Sports about the PWHL’s decision to expand the league with a new team in Detroit.
Both teams will get names and logos at a later date. The PWHL Las Vegas colours will be green and golden yellow, with green representing “the beauty of the desert and mountains that encircle Las Vegas” and gold being “a nod to the glamour of what makes Vegas, Vegas, and, of course, the Golden Knights.”
Hamilton’s colours will be gold, maroon and cream. The gold is a reference to the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ colours, while maroon is meant to represent the colour of aged steel in the city they call Steeltown.
Both teams will add players through an expansion process, though the league hasn’t announced exactly how that will work yet. It’s also not clear where the new teams will pick in next month’s entry draft.
A memo distributed to players by the PWHL Players Association earlier this month said the league wouldn’t hold an expansion draft this season, like it did to build new teams in Seattle and Vancouver last season. A significant number of players in the league are on expiring contracts, which makes an expansion draft difficult to pull off.
Instead, the league may adopt a complex, multi-phase process that would begin with teams protecting three players, according to the memo. It’s a format that could dramatically alter the look of existing teams.
The goal was finding a way to maintain “competitive balance” across the league while also making sure players have a say in the process, Hefford told CBC Sports earlier this month.
“Those are difficult things sometimes to match, so it’s been ongoing collaborative work with the [players’ association],” she said. “Once we have certainty on number of teams and location, then there will be more certainty in that process.”
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