Now at the midseason point of its inaugural season, the Professional Women’s Hockey League announced the format for the league’s first playoffs.
After kicking off in January, the PWHL has spent the last few months smashing records and gaining fans. It seems like every game, there is a new batch of fans the league’s six teams are gaining.
Adjustments to the Inaugural Season
The league came together in just a few short months after its creation in the summer of 2023, which has led to a few details of the first season being a little different from what you would expect from other sports leagues.
For example, none of the league’s teams have official names or mascots yet. All six teams have been going by their city’s names, and the jerseys have been standard replicas in each team’s official colors.
The inaugural season will also be shorter than a usual hockey season, starting in January and ending around May. The league announced that going forward, seasons will take place from November to May.
These adjustments were not meant to be permanent, but to make it easier for the PWHL to put on a season in the short amount of time they had between creation and puck drop. It was only about six months, and in that time teams needed to be created, staff hired, facilities found, and rosters formed.
A lot of these factors will likely change once the PWHL has a full offseason and kicks off it’s first full season next fall.
League Standings
Halfway through the season, the PWHL has been extremely exciting, with so many ups and downs.
Toronto won every single one of their games in February, after starting off their season at the bottom of the leaderboard. They now sit in third place. Montreal has led the standings all season, but Minnesota is right on their heels.
Boston, Ottawa, and New York make up the lower half of the leaderboard. Yet, with the way Toronto has turned things around for themselves, there is lots of time for the tides to change yet again.
Playoff Format
Last week, the league announced its highly anticipated playoff format. Here is how it will go:
The top four teams in the standings (out of the six that exist) will make the playoffs once the regular season concludes.
The top seeded team will then get to choose which team they will face in the first round, between the third and fourth seeded teams. The second seeded team will face the team that is not chosen. These semi-final matches will then compete in a best of five game series.
Home-ice advantage will still be given to the second seeded team. The winners of the first two series will them compete in the championship, another five game series.
It should be exciting to see how the standings shake out over the next few months. There has already been so much movement with the league in just two months. The games have been so competitive and surely the teams will continue to put on a show for the rest of the season.