NHL city officially lands a second pro hockey franchise as major announcement confirms PWHL expansion plans
PWHL San Jose is now expected to become the league's final expansion club for the 2026-27 season on Tuesday.
That would complete the league's planned four-team expansion push and put California on the PWHL map in a real way.
San Jose would join Detroit, Las Vegas, and Hamilton as the newest franchises added ahead of 2026-27.
This isn't coming out of nowhere. San Jose had been tied to expansion for a while, but the final agreement still needed work while the other markets moved forward first.
That delay mattered. It left San Jose looking like the unfinished piece in a rollout that already had the rest of the board set.
Now it looks like that gap is about to close, and the Bay Area is set to land a team with access to one of the biggest markets in the United States.
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San Jose gives the PWHL its California entry point
The biggest issue was never interest. It was logistics.
The league and San Jose were still sorting out how the club would fit alongside the San Jose Sharks at SAP Center, especially once the scheduling pressure of the NHL calendar came into play.
That's the kind of detail that can slow a deal late, even when both sides clearly want it done. Building a team is one thing. Building a clean arena calendar is another.
But San Jose always made sense as a target. The city can pull from San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, which gives the PWHL a wide regional footprint right away.
There's also history here. The Sharks organization has backed women's and girls' hockey in the Bay Area for years, and that support gave this market real weight once expansion talks picked up.
If the announcement lands Tuesday as expected, the PWHL will reach 12 teams for 2026-27. That lineup would include 7 American clubs and 5 Canadian clubs.
That shift matters. For the first time, the league would head into a season with more U.S. teams than Canadian ones.
And San Jose wouldn't just be another dot on the map. It would be the league's West Coast foothold with real market size behind it.
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YESTERDAY
MAY 14, 2026
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| G | A | PTS | ||
| Nick Suzuki | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| Juraj Slafkovsky | - | 3 | 3 | |
| Pavel Dorofeyev | 2 | - | 2 | |
| Ivan Demidov | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Mitch Marner | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Shea Theodore | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Phillip Danault | - | 2 | 2 | |
| Lane Hutson | - | 2 | 2 | |
| Josh Anderson | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Cole Caufield | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Josh Doan | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Jake Evans | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Mikael Granlund | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Konsta Helenius | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Brett Howden | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Alexandre Texier | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Jason Zucker | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Rasmus Andersson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ivan Barbashev | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Leo Carlsson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| COMPLETE STATS | ||||