Inside the PWHL’s race to expand westward as Seattle Torrent, Vancouver Goldeneyes debutHailey SalvianMon, November 24, 2025 at 11:16 AM UTC·12 min readVANCOUVER — Hilary Knight was on her way to a physical therapy session at the Boston Fleet practice facility when she was pulled into a meeting that would change the course of her professional career.
It was May 30, just days before the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s first ever expansion teams were set to shake up the league. Knight, one of the greatest women’s hockey players of all time, was told by Boston general manager Danielle Marmer that she would not be protected in the expansion process.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt was a shocking move for the women’s hockey world and Knight herself. She had recently signed a new lease on her apartment, thinking she’d stay in Boston long-term, and co-led the PWHL in scoring.
“My immediate reaction was just sadness,” Knight told The Athletic. “But then in a weird way, bittersweet because the sweetness came so quickly of the opportunity (in Seattle).”
On Friday, almost six months after being exposed to expansion, Knight was in her brand new Seattle Torrent jersey, facing off against the PWHL’s other new franchise, the Vancouver Goldeneyes. She was on the ice for the first goal in Torrent history and later tallied an assist, for her first point in her first game in the Pacific Northwest.
The sold-out crowd at the Pacific Coliseum was deafening for most of the night. With 14,958 fans, it was the eighth largest crowd in PWHL history, and the largest of any game played at a regular PWHL home venue.
The game – a 4-3 overtime victory for the Goldeneyes – marked the arrival of professional women’s hockey on the West Coast.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe PWHL’s expansion westward, just two years into the league’s existence, brought on seismic change. Rosters were torn apart. Superstars were on the move. And two new teams were created from scratch in a whirlwind seven months.
The PWHL first revealed its intention to expand beyond its original six teams in October 2024.
The league — which is owned by billionaire Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and his wife, Kimbra — fielded more than 20 proposals from markets across North America. One of the most aggressive bids came from the Pacific National Exhibition, a non-profit organization owned by the City of Vancouver, which was determined to showcase the city’s potential as a women’s professional hockey market.
In January, executives from the PNE hosted PWHL leadership on a tour of the Pacific Coliseum, the former home of the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks, rolling out a literal purple carpet.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“We went honestly quite aggressively,” said PNE president and CEO Shelley Frost, who wore a purple suit jacket to the meeting, paying homage to the league’s primary color.
“It’s always been on my radar personally, and on our organization’s radar, to have professional women’s sport in the Coliseum,” she added. “We had asked questions around the WNBA and we were really excited to hear that the PWHL was going to look at early expansion.”
The PNE offered the PWHL something different. If Vancouver got a team, they said, it was going to be the star of the show at the Pacific Coliseum, and the arena’s primary tenant.
An early stumbling block for the PWHL has been that their teams are often the secondary — and sometimes tertiary — tenants in their “home” rinks. That has typically meant PWHL teams playing with a men’s professional or junior hockey logo at center ice, or taking suboptimal practice and game times. In Vancouver, for the first time ever, that would not be the case.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe Pacific Coliseum has a long legacy in Vancouver, but it’s been largely empty — save for events or tournaments — since the WHL’s Vancouver Giants left in 2016. For the last few years, there wasn’t even a scoreboard in the building, after the PNE donated it to a local hockey organization.
A big part of the PNE’s pitch was a promise to bring life back into the old building and truly make it a home for women’s hockey.
“We really did everything we could to showcase for them the kind of investments we were willing to make and what this venue could look like,” Frost said. “I think we knocked it out of the ballpark.”
The organization delivered, investing over $6 million in the building. The PNE added a brand-new center-hung scoreboard, as well as new lighting and broadcast cabling to the building. They updated the locker rooms, the gym, coaches offices and medical rooms. The Goldeneyes’ logo and color palette is on nearly every surface throughout the building — even the pipes on the ceiling of the locker room have been painted the team’s “earthy bronze” color. The adjacent Agrodome got a new ice floor installed and will be the Goldeneyes’ primary practice facility.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“Getting to come to ‘work’ every day and seeing it all be about us is something that we’ve never, ever had before,” said Goldeneyes forward Sarah Nurse. “Throughout training camp, every day there was some new sign or some new branding somewhere in the arena. And to see it kind of slowly come together over this last week has been something so special.
“We’ve never, ever been a priority before. Maybe number two, three, four, five, six. But to be No. 1 is something that we’ve never experienced,” she added. “I think it’s what’s going to set the standard for the rest of the league, the rest of professional hockey in the future.”
South of the border, the Oak View Group and the NHL’s Seattle Kraken made another compelling pitch: to play at the $1.15 billion Climate Pledge Arena and train at the Kraken Community Iceplex. Expansion to Seattle would also mean joining a thriving women’s sports market, with the WNBA’s Seattle Storm and NWSL’s Seattle Reign consistently drawing big crowds.
While the PWHL wouldn’t be the primary tenant at Climate Pledge, the league’s executive vice president of business operations Amy Scheer called it a first-class building. The Torrent will have their own locker room at the Kraken Community Iceplex, as well as a newly built space 20 yards from the building that will include dedicated team offices, a player lounge, weight room and medical facilities.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe league officially announced expansion to Seattle and Vancouver in April, and immediately got to work on selecting names, logos and jersey designs. The team names were revealed before the start of the season, but due to tight manufacturing timelines, players in each market will wear jerseys with their city’s name stitched diagonally across the front of the sweater, just as the original six teams did in the inaugural season.
That the league decided to expand so far west was somewhat surprising, given the travel requirements and the expected cost. The league currently operates largely in northeastern U.S. cities and eastern Canada. But executives felt it was important that the league expands its footprint.
“We want to build a long-term sustainable league, and part of that is having more than six teams based on a region,” Scheer said back in April. “We need to be past (being) a regional league.”
Early signs point to the strength of the two markets. According to the league, Seattle had the most single-day jersey sales in PWHL history when the team’s inaugural jerseys went on sale Oct. 21. Vancouver was right on their heels, and has sold the most season tickets league-wide. Seattle, the league said, is third, behind Toronto.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“They’ve quickly become two of our strongest markets,” Scheer said. “And have set themselves up as examples of how to do this in the future.”
Expansion general managers had just a few weeks to build their inaugural rosters, first through an exclusive signing window, then an expansion draft, the entry draft and league-wide free agency.
For Meghan Turner (Seattle) and Cara Gardner Morey (Vancouver), there were two distinct paths to take. One involved raiding the unprotected lists in the expansion draft; with only three protection slots available for the PWHL’s six existing teams, several star players were up for grabs. The other option was to hand-pick some top players, while leaving room to add to the haul through free agency.
Seattle chose door number 1, starting with signing top forwards in Knight, Alex Carpenter and Danielle Serdachny, defender Cayla Barnes and No. 1 goalie Corinne Schroeder in the pre-draft signing window.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“I knew in that first window I wanted to get the core components of the roster,” Turner explained.
Turner was an assistant general manager with the Boston Fleet in the PWHL’s first two seasons, and she leaned on that experience and knowledge of the players in her approach to team-building.
At the expansion draft, Turner focused on adding size and skill, with players the team thought were the best available. She started by taking a top-pair defender (Aneta Tejralová) and 2024 first-round pick Hannah Bilka with Seattle’s first two selections. By Vancouver’s second selection in the snake draft, it was clear Gardner Morey was going a different route, taking a hard-nosed (and valuable) depth forward in Brooke McQuigge over some more established players on the board.
Turner took advantage, selecting forward Jessie Eldridge, one of the league’s most consistent offensive producers over her first two seasons, and later Julia Gosling, a 5-foot-11 power forward.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementTaking that route also meant Seattle needed to be cost-effective in rounding out its roster. They drafted for need in the entry draft, taking a middle-six center in Jenna Buglioni and a backup goalie (Hannah Murphy) in round 2. They shopped the free agent bin, too, signing skilled winger Mikyla Grant-Mentis and adding some undrafted free agents to the roster.
Vancouver, as Turner discovered in real time, opted for door no. 2.
Gardner Morey started her franchise in the signing window with two of the league’s top defenders (Claire Thompson and Sophie Jaques), a superstar forward (Sarah Nurse), a top goalie (Emerance Maschmeyer) and a local talent (Jennifer Gardiner).
Then she tried looking for some hidden gems — like McQuigge and two-way center Gabby Rosenthal — in the expansion draft to save some money to shop for bigger-ticket players in free agency.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“It was a little bit risky because it would be a lot easier to just take (top) players in the draft from another team,” Gardner Morey said. “But on another level, you had to bet on yourself and bet on your vision and your program. I think with my experience with recruiting for the last 15 years, that was natural for me.”
Before joining Vancouver as GM in May, Gardner Morey spent 14 years at Princeton University, including eight as head coach of the program. With the Tigers, she recruited and coached some of the PWHL’s top players, including Thompson and 2024 No. 1 pick Sarah Fillier. The decision to leave the program she’d built up and the players she’d coached was “heartbreaking.” But the opportunity to help build something in Vancouver was too great to pass on.
She signed North Vancouver native Hannah Miller, Czech national team star Tereza Vanisová and back-to-back Walter Cup champion Michela Cava on the first day of league-wide free agency – three of the top available forwards on the market. In the entry draft, she added Finnish star Michelle Karvinen to give Vancouver the best looking top-six in the entire league.
“They’re going to be a really fun group. It’s going to be high-octane,” Gardner-Morey said. “High energy, lots of grit, tons of skill. I just think it’s going to be such an entertaining group on the ice and off the ice.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe end result of each path taken is maybe the best two teams in the PWHL on paper.
Hilary Knight was at Target shopping for towels on the day she arrived in Seattle when a fan recognized her, yelling, “Oh my God, oh my God, you’re here!”
It’s the kind of warm welcome expected from the passionate women’s sports fan base that has taken root in Seattle. Alex Carpenter, Knight’s compatriot and Seattle teammate, had a similar experience getting stopped while shopping at a Trader Joe’s.
“People are really excited about us being here,” Knight said. “It’s just fun and a different energy.”
Knight might be a household name for most hockey fans, but the logistics of a cross-country move were no easier for her than the average person. She had movers transport her belongings from her Boston apartment to Salt Lake City, where Knight lives in the offseason with her partner, Olympic speed skater Brittany Bowe. When it came time to get to Seattle in October, the movers still hadn’t arrived.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementKnight packed as much as she could in her car and drove over 800 miles from Salt Lake City to Seattle with her dog, Bane. And as luck would have it, the moving truck arrived in Utah not long after Knight arrived in Seattle.
“I’m still missing a ton of my personal items,” she said. “But I’m happy it’s all close by.”
Any initial shock of being exposed to expansion has been replaced by excitement. Seattle is closer to home – both Salt Lake City and Sun Valley, Idaho – and provides “the opportunity of a lifetime” to play in such a strong women’s sports ecosystem, she said.
Knight was in enemy territory on Friday night, an experience she described as “phenomenal.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“To have 15,000-plus fans in the stands cheering you, booing, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s a testament to the work that we’re putting in day in and day out.”
The Torrent home opener is set for Friday, and Knight is expecting an even louder environment.
“You want to be somewhere you’re wanted at the end of the day,” she said. “And Seattle feels like that place for me.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Vancouver Canucks, Seattle Kraken, Vancouver Goldeneyes, Seattle Torrent, NHL, Sports Business, Women's Hockey
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