NEW YORK — The PWHL smashed its attendance record with a roaring, sold-out Madison Square Garden on Saturday night.
The three-year-old league’s first game at MSG featuring the New York Sirens vs. the Seattle Torrent brought in 18,006 fans, breaking the previous record it set at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena in February. It marks the highest-attended game in women’s hockey history.
“This is, for a lot of women, and for me, the realization of a dream,” Billie Jean King said to reporters before puck drop Saturday. King is a PWHL cofounder alongside her wife and business partner Ilana Kloss.
The landmark game at MSG came sooner than expected. “We were not forecasting this in year three,” PWHL advisory board member Stan Kasten, who is a co-owner of the Dodgers and WNBA’s Sparks with PWHL owner Mark Walter, said in the pregame press conference as he sat beside King.
The league is still nascent and takes planned losses each night it plays, though Kasten said it is financially tracking ahead of schedule. He added that when the PWHL flips into the black in the next few years, it will lengthen its season and, in turn, pay players more to play an extended schedule. The current season is 30 games; Kasten is looking forward to 40 or even 50.
“We’re still deep in the startup phase,” he said. “It’s a startup until we have the spike in sponsorship that we know is coming, the spike in media dollars that we know is coming. You’ll know when things have turned.”
One area the league is focusing on is getting better broadcast deals. PWHL games are currently available on some RSNs, plus all games are streamed on YouTube for free. In March, the league got its first nationally televised game with a one-off on ION, a key network for the WNBA.
“We made a decision on our own to broadcast every game with a network-quality broadcast from day one. We do not make significant money on that, which we understood,” Kasten told Front Office Sports. “It’s going to take time, but I think nights like tonight, and the last few weeks, and the next few weeks are proof of concept.”
The record-setting MSG game comes at a pivotal time for the league, which has been riding a wave since the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina. The PWHL had already seen its attendance spike 17%from the 2024–25 season, but in March, average attendance was up by more than 1,000 fans per game, bringing the season-over-season average attendance increase to 25%. Ticket and merch sales are also up since the Olympic break, according to PWHL data.
“There’s no question that the Olympics was a capstone,” Kasten told FOS.
The PWHL, which added teams in Seattle and Vancouver this season, has been barrelling toward another round of expansion for 2026–27. Kasten said home venues have been a key consideration, as the league is looking toward buildings that can hold about 10,000 fans.
The ongoing PWHL Takeover Tour, which will bring games to 16 neutral sites including NHL arenas, has also informed decisions for expansion.
Kasten confirmed that news about the next expansion cities will come in the next few weeks. “We feel so confident about where we are that even though it will cost us more money, we’re ready to expand,” he said. “There is a line of cities eager to have us there, whether it’s for a couple takeover tour games or for a full-time team.”
