A Tale of Two Expansion Teams Part I: The Coaches
Part one of four articles breaking down how PWHL Vancouver and Seattle built their teams, starting with coaching hires.
Part one of the "A Tale of Two Expansion Teams" series starts off with the head coaches of each respective team. Read on to dive deep into their careers and what each general manager might have been thinking when hiring Brian Idalski and Steve O'Rourke.
When the PWHL announced that the cities of Vancouver and Seattle were getting expansion teams, a great opportunity was born. For the fans and most of the media it means women’s pro hockey on the west coast, with all the great content opportunities that come with that. For the nerds like me, it means we get to dive deep into the minds of two general managers who had been given the tools to create the team of their dreams with very few restrictions. I’m sure Meghan Turner and Cara Gardner Morey wished they could have gotten Marie-Philip Poulin or Taylor Heise, but they didn’t get players too far off from their calibre.
It's fair to say that the PWHL expansion rules gave Vancouver and Seattle the most probable playoff teams in the league. As a refresher, the six inaugural PWHL teams (Boston, Minnesota, Ottawa, New York, Toronto, Montréal) were only allowed to protect three players at the beginning, plus a fourth player once two of their players had been selected or signed. For some teams this meant that their blueline was nearly wiped out à la Ottawa and Minnesota, or that their forward corps took a big blow à la New York and Toronto. When Seattle is threatening the league with a Hannah Bilka, Alex Carpenter, and Hilary Knight first line, even the most casual fans' jaws are dropping at the potential firepower there.
With that in mind, it’s not difficult to see some people jump to the conclusion that building these rosters was as simple as picking the best players available. I don’t think it was. Yes, Vancouver and Seattle had very favourable expansion rules, but there were still restrictions on who they could pick, and each team only had so many roster spots on their team. Not to mention, despite some disbelief publicly, Vancouver and Seattle still had to take salaries into consideration.
This is what I find the most fascinating about all of this. Since Turner and Gardner Morey were given so much leeway in building their teams, how would they choose to go about it? What biases were going to be shown in how they picked their teams? What positions, what skills, what lessons did they take from the past two seasons of PWHL hockey that they thought would be the key to having successful first seasons? Essentially, when you set a kid loose in a candy store, what are they going for first?
