PWHL Picks Vancouver for First Expansion Team

The Professional Women’s Hockey League is making Vancouver its seventh franchise, the league said Wednesday.

Vancouver, which drew a crowd of 19,038 fans during a “Takeover Tour” game earlier this year, will become the league’s first expansion team.

The league posted Wednesday morning about a livestream with expansion news later in the day, without leaving clues about which city would receive the team. However, two days earlier, the PWHL’s online store accidentally said Vancouver and Seattle would join the league. (The WNBA recently had a similar mishap where Toronto mistakenly appeared on the league website, leading to an official announcement the next day.) The quick mistake all but confirmed a Friday report by the Associated Press that Vancouver would be getting a team, with Seattle as the likeliest city to be announced next. The league tells Front Office Sports it’s still working on where it’ll place the second expansion team.

Vancouver drew the largest attendance of all nine takeover spots, followed by 18,259 fans in Quebec City. The largest U.S. crowds were in Detroit and Denver with more than 14,000 people each. (Seattle drew a crowd of 12,608.) Overall, league attendance in Canada is considerably stronger than it is in the U.S, but takeover stops south of the border have been a bright spot, drawing larger crowds than most regular season home games for the American teams.

The team will play at Pacific Coliseum and practice at the nearby PNE Agrodome, both of which will get a face lift before the team begins play. The Coliseum hosted the NHL’s Canucks until 1995, when they moved to Rogers Arena (where the January takeover game was held.) The Coliseum’s website says it can fit about 15,700 fans in permanent seating.

Vancouver will enter the league next season. The blue-and-cream colored squad won’t get a team name until a later date, going by PWHL Vancouver in the meantime. Like all teams in the league-owned structure, the PWHL will choose the branding.

Vancouver will be the league’s first west coast team. The current westernmost team is Minnesota, roughly 1,400 miles away from Vancouver. With such a small league mostly based on the East Coast, flights to Vancouver (and potentially Seattle) will significantly increase how much time players spend traveling and recovering from long flights—especially because chartering isn’t the norm in the league.

— Eric Fisher contributed reporting.