Vegas Golden Knights fans will have yet another professional hockey team to support by the end of the year. The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) announced the addition of an expansion team in Las Vegas for the 2026-27 season. Dominique DiDia, who launched CAA Sports agency’s Women’s Hockey Department, was appointed as general manager.

Since its inception in 2024, the PWHL has expanded from six teams to what will be 11, with Detroit and Hamilton, Ontario also announced as expansion locations for next season. The sport has come a long way in the last decade.  

I’ve been covering women’s professional hockey since the Minnesota Whitecaps were added as a National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) team in 2019. They proceeded to win the championship and became the first team to turn a profit – in year one. Most of these players were working full-time jobs during the season, often going to work on Monday directly from the airport after playing road games on consecutive days.

In 2020, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) continued a boycott of the two rival North American leagues despite one of them, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL), folding in 2019. Roughly 175 players held out for better salaries, benefits and “the resources professional hockey demands and deserves.”

The NWHL became the Premier Hockey Federation in 2021 – the first professional sports league to include transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse athletes. The league negotiated an exclusive, U.S. broadcasting deal with ESPN+ that was extended through the 2023-24 season. I would stream games on my phone in sports bars. When the Whitecaps scored I’d erupt, and confused patrons asked what the hell I was watching. 

In 2023, the Mark Walter Group purchased and folded the PHF, announcing the formation of the PWHL – with the help of Billie Jean King. I was a founding member of the PWHL Minnesota franchise. That’s what they were called back in year one – PWHL Minnesota – as the league hoped to familiarize people with the league rather than individual franchises. With so many iterations of professional women’s hockey leagues in the past, it was a good marketing choice. 

The league has also taken its game on the road, with teams playing showcase games at neutral sites – usually a place with an NHL team and committed hockey fanbase. Detroit was one of those showcase locations. Now the league has set attendance records for women’s hockey in Canada and the United States. The motivation for expanding to Las Vegas was a reported 600% increase in youth hockey participation since the Vegas Golden Knights debuted in 2017. PWHL Las Vegas will share the ice with the Knights at T-mobile Arena, donning green and gold.

Here’s what you need to know about the women’s version of the sport. While checking isn’t allowed at the high school and college levels, it is in the pros. It was a big deal to the PWHPA, who wanted their game to feature physicality. Players delivering body checks must be making a play on the puck, however.

Are there fights? Unofficially, no, but unofficially, absolutely. Fighting gets players a one-game suspension, and no one’s been suspended for it yet, despite the following evidence.

The game is slower, but that’s just physics, which I had to explain to high school boys sitting in my section. Mass multiplied by velocity equals momentum, and these women have a lot less mass than the men of the NHL or even the NCAA and some high school boys. That didn’t stop Minnesota captain Kendall Coyne Schofield from competing in the NHL All-Star Skills Challenge Fastest Skater event in 2019, though. Don’t get it twisted, these are the best women’s hockey players in the world, including those playing for Team Canada and Team USA.

Almost every team has an outstanding goaltender. Back in the early days of the PWHL, some teams had two. It made for low-scoring games, including the double overtime Game 4 of the 2024 Finals that ended 1-0, which I attended and stood for, throughout. That shouldn’t be the case now that 11 teams will make up the league next season and there are fewer elite goaltenders to go around.

PWHL games are streamed for free on YouTube @thepwhlofficial. The Ottawa Charge and Montreal Victoire are currently playing in the PWHL Finals for the right to raise the Walter Cup. Let’s hope the Las Vegas Snowgirls, or the Vegas Ice Queens, or the Las Vegas Vig, or Vegas Desert Divas, or Las Vegas Nights, or the Vegas Green Leafs, or whatever they end up being called, will contend for the cup in their inaugural season just as their male counterparts did back in 2018. You can secure your season ticket membership right now with a $50 deposit per seat.