The PWHL expansion process was always going to ruffle some feathers; there’s no right way to poach existing teams’ rosters to add not one, not two, not three, but four new teams. It was always going to be a painful process, not just for the fans, but for the players themselves and for the eight original teams. In fact, it seems to have been painful for everyone but for the senior vice president of business operations for the PWHL, Amy Scheer.

When the executive was asked about player loss through expansion in a media availability, she replied:

I’ve been writing about hockey for a long time, and I've never heard an executive make such an ill-advised comment that showed how little they knew about their own consumer. To insinuate that someone isn’t smart because they are attached to a particular player on their team is incredibly condescending and untrue.

What Scheer doesn’t appear to understand is that the fans have loved and cared about some of those players for a lot longer than the PWHL has been around. For years, fans followed these women in the Olympics, the Rivalry Series, the CWHL, the PHF, and the PWHPA Secret Dream Gap Tour. You name it, those fans were into it.

So when the PWHL finally arrived, and players were signed to various teams, fans were ecstatic to find out that one or many of their favourites had signed in the local market. In some cases, and in other cases, they didn’t have a local market, so they chose their team because of the players that made up that roster.

For the two seasons, there was some stability, but at the end of the second season, when the expansion rules were released, and people found out that only three players could be protected originally, it hurt. But they marched on, understanding that the league's expansion was for the good of the sport, and telling themselves it wouldn’t be as bad next time, since there would be eight teams to choose from rather than six.

However, before the end of the third season, it was announced that there would be four new teams next season and that it would include an incredibly lengthy and confusing expansion player distribution process consisting of six phases. What followed was the literal evisceration of some rosters, with the Toronto Sceptres and the New York Sirens being hit particularly hard. Not only did they lose fan favourites left, right and centre, but the two teams who missed the playoffs were made to draft after the four new expansion teams in the entry draft. The Vancouver Goldeneyes and the Seattle Torrent got the first two picks. Still, after that, a draw that included the four new franchises determined that Detroit, San Jose, Las Vegas and Hamilton would get picks three to six, relegating the Sirens (who have never made the playoffs) to seventh and the Sceptres to eighth.

In other words, fans of two franchises who struggled in the last season saw their team hemorrhage fan favourites and were then unceremoniously told that they couldn’t pick in the first tier of an incredibly exciting crop of young players, before having their intelligence questioned by a league executive.

The PWHL won’t lose all its fans over the expansion process, but it needs to remember that these people are the ones filling the seats, and they deserve to be treated with respect, at the very least.

Sceptres GM Gina Kingsbury was much better when she gave her thoughts on the expansion process:

You can feel the empathy in that message, and even when she announced that Emma Maltais would be moving on, she explained:

Would it have been so hard for the league to at least acknowledge the fans’ pain rather than be so dismissive? One wouldn’t think so…

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