Neither the Seattle Torrent nor Vancouver Goldeneyes lived up to their sky high expectations. Was it travel? Chemistry? Coaching? Drafting? Recovery time? Logistics? Or was it more accurately a combination of many items?
When the 2025 PWHL expansion process was finished, the Vancouver Goldeneyes and Seattle Torrent looked like they'd be runaway leaders of the league. General managers, players, and media across the league expected the PWHL's newest teams to win the bulk of their games, and that at least one of the two teams would be vying for a Walter Cup.
Reality has not been kind to Seattle and Vancouver, who instead of playing for a Walter Cup this spring, will almost certainly be watching from home.
It would be easy to point at coaching, or roster construction as the culprits here, but neither can be blamed completely, or even primarily for the the struggles Seattle and Vancouver experienced.
Speaking from the other side of the coin at the helm of a team that spent much of the season sitting first overall, Boston Fleet general manager Danielle Marmer was one of those believers that the expansion teams would thrive. In hindsight, she also remembers the monumental challenges new franchises face.
"I really actually think it's less about the players," Marmer told The Hockey News. "I would have done the same thing that Vancouver and Seattle did. I said after their expansion draft and their free agency, no one was going to beat those two teams."
Unlike expansion teams in other leagues however, PWHL expansion teams have almost no time to prepare. For example, in the WNBA, the league's two newest expansion teams, the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo were awarded their franchises two years before hitting the court. In the PWHL, teams had five months.
When teams arrive together, they have the shortest preseason in pro sports. PWHL teams were only together beginning 12 days prior to final rosters being due, North American national team members arrived days later than that, and some teams managed only three practices in that time. In a 12-day training camp, the league's newest teams had to make roster selections before they could even hope to start putting plans together. As Marmer said, even once they were ready to build their systems, logistics and infrastructure were secondary hurdles.
"We've had three years to establish culture, process, what we're trying to achieve, how we're trying to do it, what everything looks like," Marmer said. "When we were talking about the power play, Vancouver was trying to figure out what room they could have a power play meeting in. I think it's more infrastructure as opposed to personnel."
While Boston had a coaching change of their own prior to this season, a large percentage of their staff, and day-to-day protocol remain the same, and many players remained in the familiar market to aid off-ice stability. The time frame for new teams in the PWHL is tight, and comes with challenges.
"Anytime you start something pretty quickly, you're not doing it right the first time. You're learning by trial and error. So those teams are going to be so good once they've had some time under their belt to have their space organized, have it set up, know where their desks are, know how they're meeting, know what the process looks like, what's the relationship between the team doctor and the athletic therapist, everyone's new. So it is chemistry, but it's organizational chemistry as opposed to just the chemistry between players and the coaching staff. I think it's just a bigger, broader challenge."
Cross Continent Travel Challenging For Many Athletes
Vancouver Goldeneyes head coach Brian Idalski was critiqued online by many fans for his comments following Vancouver's recent loss to Boston in Edmonton, but his words on the challenges teams face who travel most distance have been prove valid. West coast teams who are forced to travel more frequently across time zones have long sought ways to mitigate the impact jet lag, sleep, recovery, and the toll additional travel takes on an elite athlete's body.
"It would be one thing if one of the expansion teams was killing it. We're both struggling," Idalski said. "There's something that with the travel and us going back and forth that's happening to our bodies, and we need to learn how to manage that better."
Dr. Cheri Mah, an expert in the field, has long worked with NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL teams, pioneering sleep science to enhance performance, and to educate on the impacts of sleep, travel, and jet lag on athletes. Her impressive resume of Olympians and championship teams includes working with the 2025 Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks.
An abundance of scientific, peer reviewed research exists on the topic. Dr. Jonathan Charest, the Director of Athlete Sleep Services and a Behavioral Sleep Medicine Specialist at the Centre for Sleep & Human Performance in Calgary specializes on the topic.
"With early-morning skate rituals and late-night games interspersed with medical treatments, media, sponsorship, and family obligations, the typical daily schedules of NHL players lead to inconsistent sleep opportunities. Similar to the NBA, NHL stakeholders, including players and coaches, have voiced concerns about lack of sleep and fatigue," one such study co-authored by Charest asserted.
Dr. Charles Czeisler, the Director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard University has also studied and worked with NBA and NHL teams to understand how travel impacts athletes. In particular, Czeisler has examined the importance of not only how sleep the night before a game impacts performance, but how sleep the night after training or competing impacts future success. For teams, like Seattle and Vancouver, who are more often on long flights home, the impacts could compound.
Most teams in the league made only two trips to the west coast to play Vancouver and Seattle on a single road trip. For example, for the Toronto Sceptres, those road trips each lasted only three days, with the nearly month-long Olympic break bisecting their west coast play. Other teams however, like the Boston Fleet went west more often going out west four times. Vancouver and Seattle crossed the continent 6-8 times this season with longer stays in more markets before considering the teams had multiple "home" games in Chicago, Denver, and Edmonton.
"Switching hotels from one to the next, and flights and connection flights and buses, it takes a toll," said Vancouver head coach Brian Idalski. "We’re still figuring out what that looks like and what that impact is."
It's why so many professional teams have invested heavily in sleep science, compiling dozens of new practices from bright light therapy, to timed caffeine intake, staying over after games rather than travelling home, to melatonin rich foods, limiting pre-game naps, and individualized workout timing based on pharmacogenetic testing.
The issue in the PWHL, where such supports are not readily available, is compounded again by travel conditions for PWHL players compared to other professional leagues. In other major leagues, athletes enjoy luxury accommodations and chartered flights, PWHL players fly economy, and are only guaranteed two-star hotels on the road.
Managing sleep and recovery has become such an important part of professional sport that some athletes, like four-time MLB MVP Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers travels with his own custom Nishikawa mattress constructed using 1.2 million data points acquired through 3D body scans of Ohtani's body to maximize the quality of his rest.
For Seattle and Vancouver, they'll be better prepared to support their athletes through more frequent and lengthy travel after gaining a season of experience.
Lessons In Chemistry
While there are a number of extenuating circumstances that impacted the success of Seattle and Vancouver this season, the teams will continue to learn and adapt, which is why many general managers in the league believe both teams remain well positioned to become contenders, soon.
But both Vancouver GM Cara Gardner Morey and Seattle GM Meghan Turner will also be looking for ways to retool their rosters following a new round of expansion, and chemistry will be top of mind.
Seattle saw an immediate positive impact late in the season when they sent one of their top scorers, Jessie Eldridge, to Boston in exchange for Thereza Schafzahl. While fans jumped on the move, there was much more than overt point totals that factored into the deal, and the impact was immediate in Seattle as Schafzahl brought elements and an approach to the Torrent that they lacked. She also produced bringing a new ingredient to Seattle's mix.
No Time For Draft Preparation
While Vancouver and Seattle seemingly handpicked their rosters from existing stars across the league, both notably struggled in the 2025 PWHL Draft. It's not surprising given neither team had time to properly prepare for the draft..
In other leagues, like the NHL, there's a significant wealth of information for teams who are drafting. Not only does the NHL employ a large team of central scouts, but each team has numerous scouts who scour leagues across the globe watching each player they intend to draft several times in person. In the PWHL, teams often have only one or two scouts.
When the PWHL announced the hiring of Meghan Turner on May 21, and Cara Gardner Morey on May 23, they each had one month to prepare for the 2025 PWHL Draft which was held on June 24 in Ottawa. During that time however, Turner and Gardner Morey also had to hire coaches, team staff, manage their facilities, plan for the expansion draft, and negotiate with free agents in the exclusive expansion signing window. There was just no time to prepare for all of that and an entry draft.
Seattle's draft picks have been buried, most playing at most fourth line minutes including their first round pick Jenna Buglioni. Two of their six picks, fourth rounder Jada Habisch and sixth rounder Olivia Wallin, failed to make the team out of training camp. Habisch has since signed with Seattle, and Wallin in Ottawa following injuries in both lineups.
Vancouver only had five picks, and again two, Brianna Brooks and Chanreet Bassi, failed to make the roster out of training camp.
When a professional sports team is given four weeks to plan for their entire roster, negotiate contracts, filter through the merits of hundreds of draft prospects, hire staff, hold an expansion draft, sign the core of their roster, and plan for every other logistic, it simply isn't enough. Giving those teams only a few more months to put together every other item of team operations, while simultaneously trying to plan for an on-ice campaign, and then giving these brand new rosters only 12 days together before dropping the pucks, it's no surprise Vancouver and Seattle struggled.
Perhaps in the excitement of the PWHL's first ever expansion, fans, opponents, and media saw only the potential of the talent laden rosters, without seeing the many steps it would take to bring those players together in a winning formula.