The PWHL has revealed the location of its twelfth—and presumably final—expansion franchise ahead of the 2026–27 season: San Jose. Its addition to the PWHL landscape comes during a two-week stretch of expansion announcements that have also brought new teams to Detroit, Las Vegas, and Hamilton, Ont.
Alongside the NHL’s Sharks, the newest PWHL team will join the MLS’s Earthquakes in San Jose, among other San Francisco Bay Area women’s teams, including the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries and the NWSL’s Bay FC. PWHL San Jose will share the 17,000-seat SAP Center with the Sharks.
Vegas’s new franchise continues the city’s ascent as a sports mecca: In the past nine years, the Raiders (2020) and the Aces (2018) both relocated to Sin City, while the Golden Knights were added as an NHL expansion team in 2017 and won the Stanley Cup in 2023. The city’s PWHL team will share T-Mobile Arena, which seats 17,500 for hockey, with the Aces and Golden Knights.
Hamilton will be the third of the league’s franchises in Ontario; the Sceptres play less than an hour down the road in Toronto, while the Charge play in Ottawa. PWHL Hamilton will share the newly renovated 18,000-seat TD Coliseum with Hamilton’s new AHL team, the New York Islanders affiliate that relocated from Bridgeport, Conn., at the end of this season.
PWHL Detroit will play its games at the Red Wings and Pistons’ Little Caesars Arena, which seats more than 19,000 for hockey games.
None of the new teams has a name yet, though all four have revealed respective color schemes: Red, white, and black for Detroit; maroon, cream, and gold for Hamilton; green and gold for Vegas; and orange, blue, and white for San Jose.
This marks the second consecutive season for PWHL expansion, as the league added teams in Seattle and Vancouver ahead of the 2025–26 campaign. Despite finishing their inaugural seasons at the bottom of the league standings, the Torrent and Goldeneyes were the only two teams to average more than 10,000 in home attendance during the regular season.
From the PWHL’s inception, rapid expansion was a huge priority for the league, which is now in the playoffs of its third season. The roadmap, PWHL EVP of business operations Amy Scheer told Front Office Sports in February, always included new teams for the 2026–2027 season—though the exact number of new franchises was undefined then. Twelve teams was the league’s target—at least for now.
Detroit hosted PWHL games during the 2025–26 season’s Takeover Tour, created so the league could test new markets. The game drew 9,624 fans to Little Caesars Arena on Jan. 3 and 15,938 on March 28. In Hamilton, 16,012 fans watched a Jan. 3 PWHL Takeover Tour game at TD Coliseum. Vegas and San Jose did not host any Takeover Tour stops, so 2026–27 marks the PWHL’s official debut in those cities.
According to an email from PWHLPA executive director Malaika Underwood, the league will not hold a traditional expansion draft to fill new rosters like last year. Instead, players can be signed by expansion teams in four windows, with the first one tentatively beginning May 28. Before that begins, current teams can protect up to three players on their roster.
This round of expansion is well timed, as women’s hockey is still riding the momentum of a wildly successful Winter Olympics. The gold-medal game between the U.S. and Canada averaged 5.3 million viewers on USA Network and Peacock—the most-viewed women’s gold-medal game ever.
The fervor carried over into the PWHL season, with the league crossing the one-million fan attendance mark in a season for the first time, and seeing an 190% increase in merchandise sales following the Olympics (compared to the same period in 2025). With expansion, the PWHL is hoping to capitalize on the rising interest in women’s hockey.
The PWHL is currently in the middle of the Walter Cup finals between the Victoire and the Charge. They are being broadcast on ION, the first time the event has been aired on U.S. national TV. Next up are the PWHL Draft (June 16) and PWHL Awards (June 17), both in Detroit.
