Boston Pride owner Miles Arnone talks PWHPA animosity, PHF acquisition, interactions with Billie Jean King, the new CBA and much more in this tell all interview.

In 2019, Miles Arnone, a Boston-based investor, led a group of investors in the purchase of the PHF’s Boston Pride from the league. It was a continuation of the PHF, then NWHL’s, move away from the single entity ownership model the league had been founded upon. Several months prior, the CWHL, North America's other professional women's hockey league at the time folded, and CWHL members alongside other professional hockey players, including some members of the NWHL decided to boycott and sit out participation in the NWHL. It was a move that resulted in the creation of the PWHPA and Dream Gap Tour, and now, years later, the creation of another single entity ownership model guiding a new professional women’s hockey league.

Arnone was one of seven members of the PHF’s Board of Governors, and chairman for the Boston Pride, who committed to a $25 million investment in 2022 in the league to increase player salaries, provide health care, and improve facilities. It resulted in the salary cap jumping to $750,000 per team last season, and to $1.5 million this year prior to the acquisition.

He agreed to tell his story on the relationship between the PWHPA and PHF, ongoing negotiations between the groups, and his interactions with Stan Kasten of the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King and Ilona Kloss of Billie Jean King Enterprises prior to non-disclosure agreements (NDA) coming into power in the talks. Arnone also talks about the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and plans for the league, giving his opinion on the matter. Here is the conversation. Arnone’s comments have only been edited for repetition and clarity.

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.

Why did the sale happen now?

Our expectation was that this would lead to a single league, we thought more rational people would prevail, compared to the PWHPA leadership, and it was going to take a lot of resources and there were also assertions made about what would happen to us if we didn’t find a way to make a deal there. There was a lot of pressure in that sense to do it. We also had a lot of hope early on that we would be able to work with and be a part of the go-forward solution. A lot of people - players, staff, investors - had put considerable resources time and energy into building the PHF into a viable and high paying league particularly compared to what the PWHPA has set everyone up to be paid, or rather not be paid, for the next eight years so we thought there’d be some sort of appreciation on the buyer's part and interest to work with us to reach everyone’s goal of a single unified league. Unfortunately, what happened, from observing the state of affairs today, the PWHPA got exactly what they wanted which was the demolition of the PHF at all costs, and the costs are very heavy to them and they’re very heavy to all players but a small handful of leading players there. The cost is very high to players for the future for the next eight years. 

Unfortunately I think the only winners are the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises. They won in that they got a fantastic economic arrangement that is going to allow them to make a very large amount of money building a single women’s league - undoubtedly they will have to invest a lot too - and everything the PWHPA said they wanted to get, they didn’t get. They compromised on their principles for very little in return. To reiterate, we sold because there was a lot of financial pressure to do so ultimately and we also thought a single league was absolutely where everything should go and we thought we’d be able to participate in that and leave the field with honor so to speak, and unfortunately a lot of that didn’t come to pass.

What do you think of the CBA that was signed and where this will go?

The principal feature of the CBA is that player salaries start about 16% lower than where we were going to be this season in the PHF and as far as what they’re paid relative to the work done, it’s about 37% less as they’re being required to play more games for less money. On top of that they’re locked into 3% per year pay increase across the board in terms of their effective cap for the next 8 years. Inflation is highly likely to run at 3% or more for the next eight years and if that’s the case you’re talking about a pretty substantial decrease in real purchasing power over that period, meaning players are actually going to make quite a bit less than they have been the last two years in the PHF. You have this situation where the new league itself has fantastic economics. By my calculations this CBA puts the players in a position where at the end of the 8 years they’ll be at 35 or 36% of revenue at the max, it could be quite a bit less, and that compares pretty poorly to many of the other professional sport leagues out there. 

The CBA essentially traded the total elimination of the PHF, as we know they are not using a single asset or hardly any personnel and therefore the knowledge and experience that was generated during the eight years the NWHL and PHF were in existence. They traded getting rid of that in exchange for a CBA that pays them less, and grows slower than inflation over these eight years and the nature of it is such that the salary distribution is structured to really favor a very small number of US and Canadian national team players who will be paid at the top of the scale, and will also continue to collect their compensation from their national association as well as sponsorship money. They’ll be fine as they always were. Who’s really going to suffer here are the members of the PWHPA and the members of the PHF who are not the top household name players in North America, they’re really going to suffer. 

The PWHPA insisted for years that what they wanted was a living wage for all professional players, the ability to play hockey full time and not have to take on other work, medical benefits (which they’ll get in the new league), but they certainly are not going to be able to; 80% of the players in that league are not going to be able to solely play hockey, or if they do it will be with very tight bank accounts. Part of that is they also once again engaged with a single entity league, which is another thing they were vehemently opposed to until now because they felt it put too much control with ownership because you didn’t have local care and differentiation for each team that would be beneficial to the player experience and league as a whole. Instead, you have this situation where the league can unilaterally direct the player to go to whatever city they want them to via the draft or another system, but in the PHF, we had a full free agency system so players were able to go and play where they wanted to live – where they could pursue their other career or personal interests outside of hockey, and that’s not going to be the case here. Overall, you have a situation where players have less freedom of movement, substantially lower compensation, and very dangerously they’re locked into a very modest change in pay over a period where you should expect revenue for the league to at least, in my mind, quadruple if not better.

The NHL will come in, there will be increases in revenue from broadcast, there will be substantial increases in sponsorships, likely increases in ticket prices and revenues -more games at higher prices - but all of these things that are captured by the league are not going to flow down to the players for nearly a decade, so it’s a real loss in terms of what the PWHPA purportedly stood for and where they ended up.

How did the negotiations proceed?

We obviously engaged with Stan Kasten representing Mark Walter, and we did that originally before NDA, and then ultimately we moved to an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) where we nor they could disclose the specifics of those negotiations or discussions. At the same time we knew that they were in discussion and working with the PWHPA to establish a new league. The PWHPA had made announcements to this fact and discussed it explicitly in the media and also discussed the fact they were working with the Mark Walter Group toward a CBA.

As Stan [Kasten] noted after the deal was done, he talked about how this NDA he had in place meant he couldn’t talk at all about discussions with the PHF to the PWHPA and he framed that as a negative or as a problematic situation. The interesting thing about that from a negotiation dynamic is it’s extremely advantageous. You have at the center the Mark Walter Group, Stan and his team, who know everything. They know everything that’s going on with the PHF, all it’s economics, and then on the PWHPA side, similarly they know everything that’s going on, yet the two counter parties that they’re negotiating with, neither of them are able to engage with the other side nor know anything about the state of that negotiation other than that which the Mark Walter Group might tell them, but they can use the NDA as a shield - in fact they are required - to tell them each nothing.

Stan and his team were able to negotiate a deal with the PWHPA where they could plausibly suggest that the prospect existed where the PHF was going to be in competition with this new league going forward, and therefore my guess is that led to them having an advantage in negotiating with the PWHPA about what the economics should look like. If you’re the PWHPA and you’re negotiating with the Mark Walter Group and you’re worried that the PHF is going to be in competition with you, it’s logical to accept a weaker economic deal for players to get something done because if I’m the Mark Walter Group I might say, and I’m hypothesizing, you could say, "We’re going to have to compete with this league and it might cost us a lot of money and revenue won’t be as good," whereas if you were to tell both sides what you were going to actually do, you could imagine that both sides would expect a better deal. Whether that point was made explicitly is irrelevant because I know the inferences we made on the PHF side, and I can imagine very easily the inferences the PWHPA would make. So, you have this situation where the Mark Walter Group was able to take advantage of this friction between the groups and didn’t even need to call it out explicitly, and it’s always described as friction between the groups, but it was really animosity on the part of the PWHPA toward the PHF, it was not bidirectional. The Mark Walter Group is able to use that animosity to generate a much stronger economic deal for themselves. 

Really the only winners here are the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises, which have been publicly described as owning the new league. They created a monopoly in women’s ice hockey with extremely favorable economics for ownership and obliterated any prospects for competition through the contractual terms with which they acquired the PHF, because the PHF, naively or not, believed or hoped that we would be able to participate and help drive the growth of women’s hockey forward with the Mark Walter Group even if it meant no economics or minimal economics and the reality is there’s none of that of course and they have full control of the entire women’s hockey landscape at a modest price, and the PW essentially traded having a seat at the table, better economics, an actually collaborative league that spanned all the players, they traded that away for the elimination of the PHF and it cost them quite a lot; it cost them substantial salaries and substantial income and any manner of control of the future of women’s hockey at all; they have none for eight years, which is two entire cycles of women’s college hockey graduates – none of which will have any say in this matter. And the price for that was a number, which we can’t talk about, that the Mark Walter Group paid to the PHF, whatever they spent to buy it, it turns out was just to close it. All that money went to just eliminate and preclude everyone involved organizationally and ownership-wise, either contractually because you’re precluded from doing anything in the future or because they directed to be fired all of the staff people and they have nowhere to go. So that money, instead of it going into building the game or improving salaries or improving facilities, went to just buy out and silence the competition. That’s very monopsonistic behavior and I don’t see that as a disparaging comment, I think that’s just a fact you can derive from the publicly available facts today. 

If you imagine how much money might have been paid to shut down the PHF, and instead the PHF and PWHPA collaborated, and if the PWHPA had encouraged the Mark Walter Group to bring the parties together instead of what must have been a directive to shut it down - because it isn’t good business sense to discard everything about the PHF - all that money could have gone into better facilities and/or pay and/or benefits and/or promotion and/or youth programs and/or better transportation and on and on. The PWHPA had the power to make that happen, but instead they wanted to wipe away the PHF, just as the CWHL was wiped away, and I believe, to be able to create a new narrative where they were the originators of what they hope will be the single, long-standing women’s professional hockey league in North America. You see it in their public comments. The PWHPA wants to be seen as the founders when they were really destroyers.

If I had known what the CBA would have looked like, I would have thought twice about the deal because if a new league formed with that CBA, [the PHF] would have easily won over even more PWHPA players than it had, and likely sponsors who were concerned about equitable pay and working conditions for women, on account of our better compensation and demonstrated quality working conditions, fanbase, etc. That said, if we didn’t do the deal with Mark Walter Group/Billie Jean King Enterprises, I’m guessing that they would have provided the PWHPA with more favorable terms in the CBA to be more competitive with us in a go-forward situation with two leagues. 

They had made it clear to us pre-NDA that they were forming a new league with or without us. So, you can see how the PWHPA’s insistence on not engaging with the PHF, and the fact that Mark Walter Group/Billie Jean King sitting between the two parties with perfect information about the economics and business models of both, created a very challenging situation for both the PWHPA and the PHF.

What were your interactions like with Stan Kasten and Billie Jean King?

I happen to participate in three meetings over four years with the PWHPA in person regarding bringing the two groups together, one was very early and two were much later…[Billie Jean King] never attended any of those meetings in person, [Ilona] Kloss attended at least two of them in person, maybe three. [King] was very assertive and very dogmatic that we should just go away and get out of their way and also was a very strong proponent of the idea initially that without support from a men’s league it wouldn’t be possible and therefore we had to shut down the NWHL because the NHL would only support a single league and they were "obviously" the best players in the world….

But [King] wouldn’t give us the time of day or really allow any kind of constructive engagement at all. I find that very ironic, in particular given that during the last couple of weeks there’s been some reporting about her statements that the professional women’s tennis tour should consider playing in and engaging with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the government has disembodied a US journalist and supports laws that are extremely misogynistic and homophobic. And from her perspective I guess that's ok, as she said, “I don’t think you change unless you engage”, and so she’s a fan of engaging with them, but for some reason again, people who share largely the same values and absolutely have been, as the PHF has been, real leaders in supporting all manner of gender and sexual-orientation based equality in sport, we’re very aligned with the values Billie Jean King espouses and yet we’re not worth any form of engagement from her perspective apparently. I find it distasteful and disingenuous to be treated that way, and I’m not speaking for myself particularly, I’m talking about the hundreds of players and staff and investors that participated in trying to build a better women’s game and that every step of the way, every step of the way, reached across the aisle to the PWHPA and invited them to join us. 

We were willing to give them ownership, seats at the board of governors level, participation for their leadership on a parity basis with our leadership; this was never about subsuming them and subordinating them, it was always about let’s clear the field and together we’ll just kill it. [King] would never engage to advance with us, but she’ll engage to advance with Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and it’s very hypocritical. You might ask, "Is this just a bad aftertaste you have and you’re angry about it?" No, I think it’s important to correct the narrative because facts are important and how things really occur and what peoples motivations and goals are is meaningful and important and understanding them is important if we don’t want to keep making the same mistakes because a lot of mistakes were made here. Women’s hockey was set back five years by the PWHPA actions and I would argue it’s going to be set back another eight years by the deal that they accepted, at least in terms of economics.

The point I want to make here, for many years you had Billie Jean and [Ilona] Kloss as advisors to the PHWPA actively driving their strategy - that’s clear from the engagements we’ve had with them and their public comments - and then at the end of the day they flipped to the ownership side, it’s public information that Kloss and King are going to be two of the three people that run the league. They’re invested with Mark Walter Group in the league, also public information, so they’re investors / owners in this single entity league. How do you go from advising your players to not take lower salaries and to not make any kind of compromise, to stay basically in a lockout and essentially destroy the income of a large number of players and their careers over four years, many of these players that started with the PWHPA are now retired and have not earned a single dollar from playing professional hockey, how do you go from that to then being on the other side of it and flipping like that? I think frankly it suggests a conflict of interest. They were advising the PWHPA, and at the end of the day they’re owners in the league that buys out the PHF and closes it and then they’re on the other side of the CBA with the players that leads to a dramatic decrease in their earning power and authority over the next eight years. Billie Jean King was for sure a very important figure in gay rights and the rights of women in sport many years ago, and that is something to honor and respect, but today it looks like she’s just an average run of the mill capitalist.

As regards Stan, I think he was doing what he was asked to do by his boss, and he did it well. He created an economically strong position for the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises while creating a single league – something the PHF and PWHPA couldn’t do over the course of four plus years. In the big picture that’s important.

What about the meetings with the NHL?

[King] didn’t attend those meetings in person. Those meetings in general with the NHL, Gary Bettman was very supportive of a single league solution. He clearly wasn’t going to take sides and I don’t blame him, I think they had a lot of their own fish to fry, what with the fallout from COVID being obviously something they had to focus on but I think that [Bettman] very clearly heard and understood that the PHF was willing to meet any and all of the PWHPA’s explicitly stated requirements - except laying down and dying as a league - but that the PWHPA was in fact unwilling to move at all. I remember his statement was something like, turning to Kendall Coyne Schofield, and I believe Sarah Nurse was in that meeting, and saying “Well look the PHF is willing to work with you and to go forward and figure out a way to make this work,” and he asked them if they would be willing to work with the PHF, noting that the NHL would help broker a solution and be very supportive, and Jayna [Hefford] and [Ilona] Kloss and [Billie Jean] King and the national team players driving the PWHPA bus indicated that they’re not interested in doing that. It ended up not being constructive but it wasn’t for lack of effort on the part of the NHL, but you can’t force people to do something. If they don’t want to work with us they don’t want to work with us. And this decision to walk away marked a big change in the PWHPA’s narrative. 

Prior to this they insisted that a single league was important because it would bring the NHL support in, and that their support was necessary to have a successful women’s professional hockey league. They had told us this many times, said that publicly many times, and it was a big part of the their justification as to why the PHF had to fold; so they could form a relationship with the NHL. But after these meetings, not only did they say they were going to go form a league, moving on from their showcases, but that they would do so without the NHL and that they didn’t need the NHL to form and operate a successful league.

During one of our meetings with the NHL, there was a substantive discussion going on about player benefits and conditions. The PWHPA has continued to cite instances from season two, six years ago, as evidence that conditions weren’t good when we'd continued to demonstrate and show and provide specific examples that there’s unbelievable evolution since that time and it’s not fair to look back to that, any more than it would be fair to say that the PHWPA has mislead it’s players. They ran a showcase at a youth arena in New Hampshire in 2019. Is that their state-of-affairs now? Is that professional caliber? No, of course not. When you are building something you have to start small, and do the best you can. There are always mistakes and hardships. That’s the nature of a start-up. The PWHPA never wanted to acknowledge this even though they had the same experience. I remember vividly seeing video of PWHPA players having to push a broken zamboni off the ice at one of their events playing against a men’s junior team in Florida. Should we dismiss everything the PWHPA did since because of that fiasco? Of course not, and for them to keep using this narrative that what happened in the NWHL six years ago somehow spoke to the current state of the PHF in 2022 was always dishonest on their part.

Anyway, Billie Jean was remote as she had been at all these meetings, she was sitting on a couch, had her bare feet up on an ottoman, and was kind of not paying attention particularly. At one junction she turned on her mic and said, "How come you didn’t bring any players to this meeting?" as if to say that if we weren't bringing players to the meeting than clearly we didn’t have the interest of the players in mind, when in fact it was our view that engaging our players in a discussion where they’re likely to be essentially denigrated as they had been continuously by the PWHPA was probably not productive. The issues to be discussed were about potentially merging these efforts. That was a matter for the ownership. So she denigrated us for this and whether that was a reasonable criticism or not, she thought she had subsequently turned her mic off and said “that will shut them up for a while” and so she appeared more interested in just throwing barbs than any kind of constructive dialogue whatsoever. I mean the attendee lists at these meetings was known in advance by both sides every time. So if she really cared about having PHF players in attendance, and hearing what they had to say, she could have easily asked us to bring them along. Of course she didn’t because she didn’t really care about that. She just wanted to embarrass us.

What do you think about the loss of PHF teams and branding?

Comments were made pre-NDA that, 1. Stan particularly, but in general they, didn’t like any of our branding or logos, except maybe the Riveters. The Pride logo and branding he described as being 'too controversial.' He didn’t like the double entendre that Pride represented. If they do in fact shelve the Pride brand, which Mark Walter Group now owns, I think that’s short-sighted. A large proportion of the Boston Pride’s fans, and women’s hockey fans overall are members of the LGBTQ+ community and the fact that the PHF was welcoming and embraced people from all walks of life was a great source of, no pun intended, pride, not to mention revenue.

There’s been a lot of talk, not under NDA but in general, about whether there’s an adequate facility in the Boston area for a pro women's team. I think that’s a red herring. The Boston fan base for the Pride was if not the first then one of the two strongest in the league. Relatively high attendance, certainly compared to PWHPA events. Very strong interest and engagement. Boston has one of the highest densities of youth hockey players and a high population of young girls playing hockey. You couldn't go to a girls' hockey game and not find boys and girls wearing Pride merchandise. It's a very strong market and there is a direct feeder system from the NCAA level. I personally think, this is just a hypothesis on my part, the PWHPA would not like to have any operation there at the time being because it was the locus of a lot of PHF activity, a region where they struggled to compete, and so I think it's kind of a little bit of punishment. I think not having a team in Boston is a big mistake. I'm not saying they're not having one, but if they were not to have one. There's been an amazing longstanding history of women's hockey...in the Boston area including the Boston Blades of the CWHL before the Pride.

What is the future of this league? What does it look like in your eyes?

I think over time there’s going to be a lot of glossing over or sanitizing of everything that went on with the PWHPA, and everyone I think in the long run will appropriately celebrate that there is a single well functioning women’s professional hockey league, which I very much hope is the case. I think starting at six teams is a mistake, it puts a lot of players and staff out of work and I think there’s plenty of market opportunity and there’s certainly enough depth in the talent pool. The PWHPA likes to pretend that there isn’t, and there absolutely is and you see that internationally and domestically. In my view if you took the next twenty best players in Canada, or the next twenty best players in the US and entered them into the Olympics both those teams would compete for medals. The talent pool is so deep.

Long term I think there will be more teams. I think the NHL will support the league, I doubt they’ll give them much money and it would seem odd for them to provide cash to a league owned by someone who has five plus billion dollars who has negotiated a very economical labor deal, but I’m sure there will be a lot of in-kind support like events at the all-star game or double header type events with NHL teams. There was a good deal of that at the PHF and PWHPA levels already to the NHL's credit, but now it’s easy for commercial interests and prominent people who previously didn’t want to be seen as taking sides to get engaged. Up until now if you aligned yourself with the PHF as a hockey player or a woman who had been prominent in the international arena for hockey you took a lot of abuse from the PHWPA and a lot of those people also had friends that were on one side or the other so no one wanted to get involved so you’re going to have this coalescing of people, once we get through this period of agita, and I think in the long run it will be very successful. It’s a great product, the women’s game is a fast game, a highly skilled game, it’s enjoyable to watch, I think it will be much more economical than attending NHL related games so I think there will be a very nice, growing market, and it will become a very profitable business over time with strong support from sponsors and the like. While I don’t think there will be a women’s team for every men’s team in the NHL, I think there will be a substantial number closely associated with NHL teams in hockey-rich areas. I think you’ll have a large footprint league that will grow over time. 

Now whether they’ll have a lot of labor strife between now and the end of the eight years remains an open question in my mind, because I think if you get a little bit down the road and they don’t make a change or changes to this CBA, I think players are going to find themselves economically in a pretty disadvantageous position and whether or not they stand for it over eight years, particularly once the current generation of Olympians are retired, I don’t know. I also think unfortunately for a time there’s going to be a real bias toward PWHPA players over PHF players, but hopefully over time that will all wash out; it’s harder in a single entity league than one with multiple owners to prevent this kind of bias because when you have multiple owners they're all fighting to win against each other so they’re going to care a lot less about whether a given player was aligned with the PWHPA or PHF before. They’re going to just sign the players that help them win. With a single entity league that motivation doesn’t exist in the same way. It’s an entertainment product more so than in a true multi-owner league.

How do you think the new league impacts international competition? Do you think it's beneficial?

If we had come together and built a league of more teams I think the answer would be 'yes,' but with only six teams it’s quite a constriction. As there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment with international players' visas and where they’re going to land or not, I think a lot of them are going to boomerang back to European leagues because there’s some surety there; it’s very opaque now. I think the new league has said they will explain how this is going to be handled in August. One of the great things about the PHF is it did provide an opportunity for international players to compete at a higher level than they could have otherwise on a regular basis and to develop their skills. The new league is smaller and will be overwhelmingly dominated by North American players.

In the near term, the single league that’s being proposed in terms of its scale is going to lead to some regression, in the long run if they can scale and put enough teams into play and if they can get compensation to improve because it’s pretty hard as an international player in particular at the levels proposed in the CBA. You can’t come to the USA or Canada and work a side job, the only income you can have is from your hockey activities. If you’re an American or Canadian working in your home country, where if you have to, you can have a side hustle or do something else to earn money, it’s a lot easier to make a go of it if you are only being paid $30K or $40K to play hockey. So it’s easier to stay active and develop as an American or Canadian even if you haven’t yet made the national team in this environment than if you’re an international player. You can’t come here and if you’re only going to make $45,000 as an international player and have to find a place to live and all that it’s pretty hard. Now the CBA suggests that it's possible the league will pay for all housing, but even then you have to pay taxes on that, so that means 20% to 30% of the cost of the housing has to come out of the player’s pocket in cash. So unless the league is going to gross that up by the 20% or 30% it’s hard as a European or Asian player.

In the near term it’s a negative for the development of a broader base of international competition and in the long run it has the potential, just like the PHF did and was succeeding at of being a great leveler and a way to expand the participation and parity across international hockey.

There have been some public comments by Stan, I believe, about the new league expanding outside of North America. That seems pretty unlikely in my view. If the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLB can’t operate outside of the US and Canada, how would a new women’s ice hockey league? That feels like it's 10 years out at the very least, probably 20 years if it could ever even make economic sense, which I doubt.

Is there anything else you'd like to say, that you feel we haven't covered?

I don’t certainly, and I don’t think the PHF ever begrudged the PWHPA for having a different perspective of how things should be and wanting to pursue that, but I don’t think the PWHPA's communications about that, their stated reasons for doing what they did, their expectations, were honestly stated or pursued. In the end unfortunately I think this was more about power dynamics than anything else and the result has been essentially a big step backward. You have to start over, a new league, a single entity league that’s going to pay less for many in the league. A lot of the goals the PWHPA purported to support they’ve not reached. Really the only goal that they’ve definitively achieved was to eliminate the competition and they did that very effectively in the end. 

That said, I think everyone associated with the PHF, from ownership and league management on down wishes everyone well. Ultimately, our goal as investors and our staff and our players was to see professional women’s hockey advance and become economically viable. The PHF made huge strides in this regard, and I think that as a single league entity with the substantial backing it has here, while it has that potential, there’s a real chance that the CBA could come back to bite them. The players and the staff that worked in the NWHL and PHF for those eight years did a huge amount to advance women’s professional hockey, while taking a lot of abuse, and made this entire kerfuffle possible and did much more than anybody. I think you’re going to find the PWHPA trying to suggest that they advanced women’s hockey, but I think they hampered the progress of women's hockey. What’s really sad from my perspective is that NWHL and PHF players and staff - and the CWHL before them - are at risk of being relegated to the dust bin of history in terms of the narrative today. I hope that doesn’t happen because they were the pioneers.