As the PWHL prepares for its second season with new rules designed to increase offence, the league appears to be on solid footing.
There is nothing like a name.
It will be significantly easier to write about the Montreal entry in the Professional Women’s Hockey League this season, if only because at last, we have a name: the Victoire.
You would think that a veteran scribe who has written several thousand columns and millions of words would be able to steer around the absence of a moniker, but it’s trickier than you think.
Repeating “Montreal” over and over like a mantra gets tedious very quickly, even if you throw in a retro usage and call them “the Montreals.” While I favoured the Montreal Maroons and a slice of history, there is no reason this new women’s team should have to render homage to a men’s team that has been defunct since before Second World War.
So Victoire it is. The moniker didn’t grab me immediately but it grows on you, especially in combination with that stunning logo. The elegant jersey design and the sophisticated colour scheme fits perfectly with this fashion-conscious city and Victoire, well — seems to me there is a men’s team in Montreal that has won a victory or two in the past.
That’s the marketing aspect of the job and the Victoire have handled it superbly. The team ranked third in attendance in the league’s inaugural season with an average of 6,881 (behind Ottawa and Minnesota) but that’s deceptive: most games were played at the atmospheric but tiny Verdun Auditorium (capacity 4,114) and only four games at Place Bell in Laval (capacity 10,062). This year, Place Bell is home base and attendance should zoom upward.
The record set by Montreal and Toronto on April 20 is unlikely to be broken for a while — the rivals drew 21,105 fans to the Bell Centre for the “Duel at the Top,” breaking the previous women’s hockey record of 19,285 set at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto two months earlier.
From the league’s perspective, that’s the bright side of the story as the PWHL prepares for its second season. Not so bright? Attendance in Boston last season (average 3,770) and New York (2,496) two absolutely critical pillars going forward.
The 2024-2025 season begins next Saturday, Nov. 30, and ends May 3, 2025, with each team playing 30 games, six against each opponent. There will also be nine neutral-site games played in Edmonton, Seattle, Vancouver, Denver, Buffalo, Raleigh, Detroit, St. Louis and Quebec City. The league is testing the waters for expansion and yes, please — we would very much like to see a franchise in Quebec City and a bitter instantaneous rivalry before the teams have even met.
Fortunately, the league is young, relatively small, agile and flexible. It isn’t a vast, hidebound entity like the NHL, burdened by layers of outmoded tradition and a “code” more suited to an era of sabre-tooth tigers and tar pits.
In search of scoring, the league has brought in the “no escape” rule, meaning that if you’re on the ice when your team is penalized, on the ice you stay. If a defender is sent off, you’re left with only one and three often fatigued forwards until you can get a change on the penalty kill.
If the “no escape” rule doesn’t have the desired effect on scoring, the league can always take the draconian step and ban icing on the penalty kill. When you think about it, it’s always been a little strange that the penalized team is given that get-out-of-jail-free option.
Beyond the rules on the penalty kill, the PWHL needs to look closely at the way goal reviews are handled. As with the NHL and NFL, it often seems that the entire purpose of replay reviews is to negate great plays. There were several instances during the PWHL playoffs when goals were waved off after lengthy reviews of video evidence that was clearly inconclusive.
It requires a simple mandate: In a league that needs goals and on close replay decisions that are less than clear (i.e., most of them) the verdict should always go in favour of the offence.
And so it begins. Bonne chance, Victoire. May your victories be many and your injuries few.