A Winter Classic Debacle and the Future of Women's Pro Hockey

When Hockey Night in Canada leaked the news earlier this month that Les Canadiennes of the Canadian Women's Hockey League would play the Boston Pride of the National Women's Hockey League on December 31 at the NHL's Winter Classic, fans of both leagues were ecstatic. Women's hockey has a firm foothold in the northeastern corner of the U.S., as well as parts of Canada and Minnesota, but the sport is still in its nascent stages as a professional on-ice product. How better to grow their audience in new markets and inspire future players than by playing outdoors, under the aegis of the NHL, in front of millions of hockey fans?

The celebration was short-lived. Just minutes after the Winter Classic news broke, star forward Hilary Knight told the press that she and eight other members of the Pride would be unable to attend the game due to a conflict with a previously-scheduled USA Hockey training camp. Fans and media alike urged USA Hockey to release the players for the good of the women's game, but the option was never on the table; instead, a USA Hockey source indicated to The Hockey News that any player who chose to attend the Winter Classic over camp risked losing her spot on the national team.

To keep the game from becoming a blowout, Dani Rylan, the NWHL's founder and GM of the New York Riveters, proposed the Pride fill the gaps in their lineup with other league players. Meanwhile, the same THN column reported, the CWHL was considering withdrawing from the game entirely. In fewer than 48 hours, a triumphant moment for women's sports had deteriorated into a debacle, leaving fans confused, angry and frustrated.

In many ways, the dust-up—or should it be snow-up?—surrounding the Winter Classic represents the uneasy status of women's professional hockey, and the problems players in both leagues and their proponents face in trying to establish a viable business model for their sport.

The launch of the NWHL this past fall left the eight-year-old CWHL competing for its own players. For some, the all-American league offered a chance to compete closer to home; the "Founding Four" NWHL teams are all within driving distance in the northeastern United States. For others, the payoff was more literal: for the first time, an elite women's league promised to pay its players. The salaries were nowhere near enough to live on, but they represented a paradigm shift for women's professional hockey, one that won over marquee names and Olympic players like Hilary Knight and Meghan Duggan.

The CWHL, in contrast, had been focused on providing a place for post-collegiate players to develop in between Olympic years. It operated on a small budget, hoping attendance would grow to the point at which salaries could be paid. The league faced its own limitations due to this approach, including player dissatisfaction with the financial arrangement, and U.S. players feeling subsumed by the Canadian identity of the league. In 2013, the CWHL's sole U.S. team, the Boston Blades, protested their new contracts by refusing to take the ice against the Montreal Stars (today's Les Canadiennes).

With this kind of bad blood between the club and the league, it was unsurprising when many U.S. players hopped over to the NWHL only a short time later. The damage was already done; still, the CWHL announced in late fall that it would pay its players a small salary by 2016-2017, and stepped up its marketing and outreach game on social media. In December, meanwhile, the NWHL announced a multi-year sponsorship deal with Massachusetts-based Dunkin' Donuts (which already sponsors eight NHL teams), as well as contracts with local sports channel NESN for live coverage and Disney-owned sports behemoth ESPN for live online streaming.

Then came the Winter Classic.

For years, the NHL had deftly deferred direct questions about their support for professional women's hockey, and the squabble called their future involvement into question. To some, it seemed as if the CWHL and NWHL reacted like King Lear's daughters the first time the men's organization stepped forward to promote the women's game on an international stage: sucking up to the throne while simultaneously stabbing each other in the back. For others, the Lear analogy worked the other way, starring the NHL as a patriarch with too much power and illogical preferences.

No matter how easily and smoothly the development of the exhibition game could (or should) have gone, one very large problem remains: while the women's game will benefit from NHL support––and all its accompanying advertising––it is almost certain that the NHL would rather support one league, not two competing entities. The CWHL has already partnered with individual NHL teams to support franchises such as Les Montreal Canadiennes, the Calgary Inferno, and to some extent the Toronto Furies; meanwhile, the NWHL received only a statement of support from NHL Commissioner, Gary Bettman. In the end, however, the fate of the women's leagues is in the hands of those who work and play for them: the players and the commissioners. Their actions will determine the course of the game, and they alone can decide whether to merge the two leagues or keep them separate.

Calgary Flames General Manager Brian Burke, who sits on the board of governors of the CWHL, recently suggested that the women's game has a much stronger future with only one league running the show. Hayley Moore, the general manager of the NWHL's Pride, agrees.

"Anyone you ask in women's hockey is going to tell you that it makes sense to have all of the best players in one league," said Moore. "What that looks like in the future right now, I don't really know, but I think anyone in women's hockey and even outside of women's hockey, with an outside perspective, would say of course, you want one league with all of the best players. That's definitely our goal."

"In a perfect world, if both leagues could be merged and there was enough financial support to have the teams travel to each other and all the players paid, that is the goal," said the Connecticut Whale's Shannon Doyle, one of the NWHL players who will help fill the roster for the Pride. "It would be silly for anyone to say they want to have the two leagues separated."

Like almost everyone involved with women's hockey, Doyle made her commitment to the sport as a whole clear. "Both of the leagues, their motto is that they're trying to grow the women's game. It's not about them, it's not about each league separately; it's about growing the game as a whole. Having one singular league that is split up as the NHL does it and has Eastern and Western Conferences, or something along those lines would be fantastic," Doyle said.

"In the end, for the league to grow and the women's game to grow I think that they should be in partnership."

After the events of the last few weeks, the question may not be if they should, but if they can, under current leadership. The Winter Classic debacle shows just how difficult it could be to engineer a merger between the NWHL and the CWHL, considering how high tensions ran between the leaderships over a showcase intended to expand the reach of both leagues.

On Monday, the issue was put aside, at least for the time being. Despite worries that the outdoor match would be canceled altogether, the NHL announced that the showcase would go on: Les Canadiennes would play the Boston Pride, who would fill their roster with the NWHL's other Boston-affiliated players. While the absence of information didn't make anyone look good (the NHL included), it was momentarily forgotten in the aftermath of the announcement that three women—Rylan, CWHL Commissioner Brenda Andress, and NHL Senior Vice President of Business Affairs and Integrated Marketing Susan Cohig— had put together a women's hockey showcase on the biggest stage on the continent.

The bumps along the way may just be part of the learning-to-fly story for both the NWHL and the CWHL. It seems a safe bet to say that the women's game can, with proper marketing and player incentives, draw a big enough market share that companies are willing to invest and lend their platforms; the NWHL's partnership with big names like Dunkin' Donuts already shows the possibilities within reach. But is it enough to convince the CWHL, which has played it safe for so many years, that the risk of paying players and investing in their product financially is worth the reward? On the flip side, the CWHL's ability to attract multiple sponsors, a number of highly ranked members of the hockey community for their board of governors, as well as the top players in the U.S. and Canada for so many years demonstrates that the NWHL could learn a lot from the CWHL's slow but steady progress.

In the end, the debacle that led up to Winter Classic showcase may provide the strongest rationale for combining the two leagues. The CWHL's emphasis on player development combined with the NWHL's outgoing financial savvy could be the perfect formula for a successful expansion, and provide hundreds of women with the opportunity to play for pay against elite competition at home and abroad.