With a long-running feud in women’s professional ice hockey now settled, a new league with many of the world’s best players is ready to push forward in January, and its inaugural home cities and other details were announced on Tuesday.
The six teams in the new Professional Women’s Hockey League will be evenly divided between the United States and Canada, with teams in Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, the New York metropolitan area, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. The team nicknames and arenas are to be determined.
“The journey to get us here has been long and twisted,” said Jayna Hefford, a five-time Olympian for Canada who is the new league’s senior vice president for hockey operations.
The top women’s hockey league from 2015 to 2023 was the Premier Hockey Federation, which was initially called the National Women’s Hockey League. It struggled to reach the level of success of other top men’s and women’s professional leagues in North America. Small salaries meant that players often had to work second jobs, and television coverage was not prominent.
Dissatisfied with the league’s progress, members of the players’ union, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association, boycotted the league beginning with the 2019-20 season. The hundreds of players who…
