Tonight, the Professional Women’s Hockey League will draft 72 players to join its ranks. Among a record 235 players who have declared for the draft are five new U.S. Olympic gold medalists. As a bonus attention-grabber, fans were simultaneously watching to see where the sport’s biggest star, Hilary Knight (who led the U.S. Olympic team to their gold medal and then appeared on Saturday Night Live) would end up as the league expands; yesterday, it was confirmed she’s moving from Seattle to Detroit. Overall, the surge of attention is a high-water mark for women’s hockey and a league that is only three years old—but figuring out how to capitalize on its Olympic boost.
Unlike other leagues, the PWHL has a single-owner structure. That means one owner—Mark Walter, the Guggenheim Partners billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and recently bought a majority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers—owns the league and all its teams. The format has its drawbacks, but it’s less complicated when building from scratch than negotiating with a dozen team owners as is necessary in the WNBA or NWSL. The league has taken a divergent approach to other decisions as well; rather than holding out for media deals, it started streaming all its games for free on YouTube to build fandom (with the hope that media deals would follow). It launched some teams without names, choosing speed over perfection.
