Will Ottawa hockey fans be victims of PWHL success?

City columnist Bruce Deachman writes a new, smaller arena at Lansdowne Park will be too tiny for Ottawa’s pro women’s hockey team.

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Published Jun 11, 2024 • Last updated 5 hours ago • 4 minute read

April 27, 2024: Ottawa fans came out in full force, cheering on their favourite PWHL players during and after the warmup skate. Here, fan favourite goalie Emerance Maschmeyer stops to give away a puck to one lucky young fan after the warmup skate. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /POSTMEDIA

Monday night’s Professional Women’s Hockey League draft was all about looking forward, with each of the league’s Original Six teams aiming to improve its chances of winning the Walter Cup next season and beyond.

(And yes, we might as well start referring to Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Minnesota, Boston and New York as the PWHL’s Original Six, as it’s easy to imagine the league expanding to other cities before long.)

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The triumph of the Ottawa club, in particular, is among the league’s most remarkable stories. Despite playing in by far the smallest market of the six cities, and ultimately not making the playoffs, PWHL Ottawa led the league in average regular-season home attendance, with close to 7,500 fans at each of its dozen TD Place Arena games. (League champs Minnesota, by comparison, which plays its home games at the 18,000-seat Xcel Energy Center, home of the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, was second, with 7,138. The league average, meanwhile, was 5,448.)

It’s not unreasonable to expect this support to continue. After all, this success followed a very short runway for the PWHL in general — the schedule, for example, was only released about a month before the season started, while individual team names and crests have still not been announced. Subsequent seasons ought to roll out more smoothly.

Meanwhile, if you attended even just one home game, you’ll understand why Ottawa was so successful. The vibe at games was wholly fun and welcoming, with cheering youngsters everywhere, many of them wearing the hockey sweaters of their peewee teams. And while professional athletes in all sports serve as role models, that aspect of sports fandom is nowhere else as evident as I saw at PWHL games. Fans felt extremely connected to the players.

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The fans, of course, came to cheer on Ottawa, but they seemed equally enthused just to be among other like-minded fans. If you put 7,500 people with that mindset in one room, you get lots of electricity, and PWHL Ottawa has been one of the most exciting additions to this city’s entertainment landscape.

Yet, at the risk of sounding like Eeyore, I worry that the team, and specifically its fans, could end up being victims of that very success.

The club is expected to move to a new but significantly smaller arena at the start of the 2028-29 season. The capacity of the arena and concert venue planned for the berm of Lansdowne Park’s Great Lawn, including suites, club seating and standing room, will max out at about 6,500 for hockey games. That size of arena, says Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group president and CEO Mark Goudie, pretty much perfectly matches the events it has been and expects to continue hosting at Lansdowne. As a concert venue, it neatly fills the gap between the National Arts Centre’s 2,000-seat Southam Hall and the Canadian Tire Centre’s NHL-size arena suitable for Bruce Springsteen and other A-listers. As a hockey rink, it’s the perfect size for the Ottawa 67’s.

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But not the PWHL.

Based on last season’s attendance, the new arena would leave about 1,000 Ottawa fans out in the cold at each game, and far more for some matches; consider the 8,300+ who attended the season opener in January.

If that happens, a possible outcome is that fewer available seats would be accompanied by higher ticket prices, resulting in many fans no longer being able, either financially or logistically, to attend games. And with that, quite possibly, the perfect mix of fans that made games such a joy to attend this season would be lost.

Otherwise, the team needs to consider a larger arena, a tall order with only one solution. If the Ottawa Senators finally get a downtown arena, adding the PWHL to the mix there would be a good option. Otherwise, there’s nothing suitable. Gatineau’s Centre Slush Puppy, home of the Olympiques, only seats about 4,000.

But just as the draft brings no measure of certainty, no one knows what the future will bring. Were the record crowds the result of the newness of having professional women’s hockey in town, and thus destined to fall as the novelty wears off? More likely, I think, is that fans maintain those levels or push them even higher. And how might the expected expansion of the regular season by a half dozen games per club affect attendance? I reached out to the league, but, because of the draft this week, no one was available to comment.

With a further two seasons to go on the team’s lease at TD Place Arena, the picture will likely become clearer before the old Civic Centre falls under the wrecking ball. But before that unfolds, the team and city need to look forward and navigate what will hopefully be an even greater success.

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