I watch the SDHL (the womens SHL in sweden) on a regular basis so I like and support womens hockey, but I cant support this league of former PWHPA primadonnas!
This nuked all my my interest in the new league.
They have killed and erased the Premier Hockey Federation (NWHL) These overloads just keeps pretending like it never existed, its disgraceful. The PWHL are hockey and franchise murderers, nothing less! And now they are pretending to be heroes and saviors of womens hockey, sheesh!
I wont sing Knights & Coynes praises after this horseshit! They are blacklisted by me and I am sure I will add more players to the list. Anyone just moving on after they destroyed teams, staff and fan bases is not wired my way!
I will hold the people behind this madness accountable as long as they are playing or working in hockey! Obviously they wont care about that all, but its just the principle! Do classless sh1t like this, expect the same treatment back! I´ve always had a bad feeling about these overloards and they did not prove me wrong sadly.'
"The PWHPA wants to be seen as the founders when they were really destroyers."
This is Hilary Knight's legacy. What a great way to ruin your reputation - destroy an entire league because you're on a power trip.
Why did the PHF sell the league to the Mark Walter Group?
We all knew that ultimately a single league was the way to go, the NHL wasn’t going to participate until there was a single league, that sponsors were split because there wasn’t a single league, and ultimately our avenue to the broadest market, whether it be live, or via television or streaming would be the best if there was one league and there wasn’t this kind of contentious dialogue, although most of that contention was PWHPA driven as the PHF were very much a “take the high road” organization.
We had been pursuing a path for four years responding to the PWHPA’s concerns driving improved benefits, conditions, salaries, places to play, locker rooms, exposure, because frankly it’s the right thing to do, and also because that was the explicit stated requirements of the PWHPA to unify, never mind they turned out not to actually care about that. In general we thought the idea of a single league was a good idea and anyone who wanted to talk about that we wanted to engage with.
Talks With the PWHPA and PHF were not productive
It’s very clear if you read Kendall Coyne-Schofield commentary, or Hilary Knight, or Billie Jean King, or Jayna Hefford, or others that have been prominent spokespeople for the PWHPA, they’ve had nothing but disdain for anything and everything that [the PHF] might do. You can similarly see that in the public record we never took that position as a league, and I personally think that was a mistake. Not a mistake in that we should have been vituperative or cantankerous or derogatory, all of those things which they were, but rather we much more forcefully should have stated why their assertions were false. It’s not abundantly clear in looking at the deal they were ultimately willing to cut in their CBA, that this was ever really about working conditions, compensation, benefits, the future of women’s professional or amateur hockey at all, it was really just a power play and a desire to be in charge at any cost.
I had some interactions with the PHWPA beginning four years ago. We came together with them in an office in Philadelphia to discuss the possibility of coming together. They had previously sent us a list of demands of things the NWHL at that time were deficient in from their perspective that would have to be rectified to affect unification.
Our position at that meeting was, "Yes, we’ll do all those things." Their retort was, never mind, the only way a professional women’s hockey league can work is if it’s supported by the men’s league, the history of professional sports for women is they only work when they’re supported by men, the NHL is only going to support one league, so you just simply need to close and then we can go about our business. That didn’t make sense from our perspective, we had invested substantially to try to build, and were working to build an ever more viable league…and we didn’t feel like they were engaging with us in good faith given their public statements about where we were deficient and what was needed for a league, contrasted against what we were willing to do, which was exactly what they asked for. That’s always been the case, and we frankly have exceeded what they asked for then and in subsequent discussions, but it never mattered, it was never really about that.
What this was really about was a small number of US and Canadian national team players wanting to control their own destiny, period. It would have been a lot easier for everyone if they’d just been up front about that instead of hiding that motivation and asserting it was all about justice, and working conditions and rights, which it just wasn’t."