No Feeling Is Final

Siobhan as Madeleine boldly states "He died for our sins."

Sure! So, high level history recap:

the PWHL was founded in 2023 and started playing in 2024

there were 6 original teams: Boston, Minnesota, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto

founding teams played for two years without expansion

in 2025, 2 more teams were added: Seattle and Vancouver

in spring 2026, the winter Olympics happened

in May 2026, 4 more teams were announced: Detroit, Hamilton, San Jose, and Vegas

on May 27, this year's league expansion "player distribution process" rules were announced

on June 2, the player distribution process started

today, June 15, the team picking order for the draft was announce

the draft is scheduled to take place Wednesday, June 17

For context on this year's timeline, the 2025 new teams were announced in April, player distribution happened June 3-9, draft order was announced June 13, and the draft was on June 24. So the first, and main, problem this year has been the speed.

Rules were released just five days before player distribution started. The rules are different than last year, and they are complicated. There's a fair amount of ambiguity and at least one team (Detroit) hired a consultant to help. As teams were still trying to figure the rules out, player distribution started and existing teams had to start making choices about who to protect, and new teams on who to go after. And while that was going on, no team knew what order they'd be in the actual draft except Vancouver, so no one could properly strategize. The list was only finally released today.

It's likely the league wanted to see how player distribution shook out before setting the draft order, because they wanted to make sure things were sort of even. Although if that was the plan - why schedule the draft so close to player distribution instead of at the end of the month like last year? Between the Olympics and the generational talent we've got entering the pool, it makes mroe business sense to announce the draft order in time for people to have fun speculating and drumming up more interest and publicity! Instead they waited until the last possible minute, and made some pretty bad order decisions when they did.

Last year, new teams could take a maximum of 4 players from any team total, across all phases. This year, while there was a limit on contracted players who could be signed by new teams, there was no overall limit. Some teams lost 6 players while others lost 3.

In the 2025 draft, new teams went last, and alternated who went first between them each round. In the 2026 draft, new teams are going 3-6, and not alternating on rounds.

This is shitty for a couple reasons. First, new teams just got cream of the crop picks across all the existing teams, so why should they get to go near the top of the draft, too? They haven't before. Second, the league's failure to follow the gold plan.

The gold plan was an incentive for existing teams who didn't make the playoffs to still try and win. The better they did with their remaining games, the more gold plan points they got, and the more points, the higher on the upcoming draft list they would be, with the understanding that gold plan teams would be ahead of playoff teams regardless of how many points they received. The gold plan order at the end of the season was:

Vancouver

Seattle

New York

Toronto

The draft order, however, inserted the new teams before New York and Toronto in a direct contradiction of the draft order still listed on the gold plan page of their website. Regardless of whether people think the new teams should have been at the end or in between gold plan/playoff teams, people are pretty united that this is horrible for NY and Tor and the league did the list bad.

The reason (we are guessing, at this point, although with pretty good evidence) for putting the new teams so high up is to try and balance a blunder the league made with the new Vegas team. See, each new team had an "EFO" offer they could use in phase 2 of player distribution. It's basically a contract that a player is required to take, and the idea was to guarantee each new team would get at least one valuable, experienced player. Vegas used theirs for Hilary Knight.

Knight did not want to go to Vegas. In fact, Knight had already secretly signed with Detroit, and Detroit had used that information to convince several other player to sign with them. Because it was secret, Vegas used their EFO, and then the league had to decide how to resolve things. Knight said she would retire if she was forced to play for Vegas. (As a side note, I think EFOs shouldn't exist and players should all feel empowered to advocate for themselves; I do not blame Knight for doing so here.) The league therefore approved a trade - Vegas would trade Knight for Detroit's first draft pick spot. This is still unofficial - it can't happen officially until the draft is underway, but the Associated Press leaked the trade early.

through the years