While most hockey fans’ attention was on the 4 Nations Face-Off championship on Feb. 20 at TD Garden, hockey history was also being made in Ottawa, Canada.
Boston Fleet’s Jill Saulnier and the Ottawa Charge’s Tereza Vanišová tossed their sticks and started throwing punches at each other in the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s first-ever fight.
With the inaugural season last year, one would expect the PWHL to have already seen fists flying on the ice. However, fights are rare in women’s hockey, and players grow up not even body checking one another—a fighting skill introduced in U-14 boys hockey.
While of course there are powerful hits in other professional women’s leagues—and at the Olympic level—actual sticks-down punching does not happen often. Despite this, Saulnier felt it was a natural outcome of the new league.
“It’s a heated game, it’s a physical game, and we’re all very competitive,” she said to The Athletic. “It’s just the way that the chips kind of fell in the corner.”
Said chips included a hit and two cross-checks by Saulnier against Vanišová, followed by the Ottawa player throwing her opponent’s stick to the ground.
In men’s hockey, players usually drop their gloves and start fighting bare-knuckled. But, the men in the NHL and other professional leagues wear helmets with visors, where there is still some exposed face beneath it. In women’s hockey, players wear full cages and would have a tough time trying to leave a mark on their opponent instead of themselves if they dropped their gloves.
Both Saulnier and Vanišová were sent to the penalty box with minor roughing calls. Before their altercation, there wasn’t a consensus on what the penalty would be for a situation like theirs, other than that they would be penalized somehow or possibly ejected from the game.
While the fight was nice evidence of the physicality that female players can bring to professional hockey, it will not be as normalized as it is for the men. In their 2024-25 rulebook, rule 46 states “‘Fighting’ is not part of PWHL’s game.” That straightforward statement is followed by punishments given by the linesperson: penalty, ejection, and/or “further supplementary discipline.”
In the NHL, not only does the rulebook not flat out say “We don’t allow fighting,” there are instructions for what other players on the ice who aren’t fighting should do as well as which items of gear instigators are allowed to remove before a fight.
About a week after the game, the PWHL clarified that those punishments would more specifically be “a 5-minute major penalty and a game misconduct, with a possibility of further discipline following a review and taking into consideration repeat offenders.” The equipment barrier will most likely continue to be a natural discouragement for fighting in the PWHL.
Along with the first fight, the women’s Boston-Ottawa game featured another historic stat—the first-ever PWHL Gordie Howe hat trick. Howe was a major force in the NHL from 1946-1980, both an all-around great and a player who was not afraid to get physical. Thus, the feat with his namesake includes scoring a goal, assisting a goal, and fighting all in one game. Vanišová had assisted on the Charge’s first goal, and after she left the penalty box, she tied the game 2-2, completing the first Howe “hat trick” in the league’s history.
Despite the fact that it will not continue as a common occurrence, both teams recognized that the fight brought massive media attention to the league—even from outlets that don’t usually cover women’s hockey.
“I think more people reached out than when we won a gold medal,” Saulnier, a member of the 2022 Canadian Olympic team, said to The Athletic. “Obviously you shouldn’t fight every game, but I think it was actually good because it got more eyes on the league.”
“Neither player backed down and I suspect there will be a little bit of buzz about it, which is never bad for the game either,” Ottawa coach Carla MacLeod added.
Fleet center Susanna Tapani broke the tie in overtime, giving Boston the 3-2 win. The Fleet is currently ranked third overall in points with 31 in 20 games played, only one point behind the Toronto Sceptres.
This season, the PWHL is doing a takeover tour; teams will play games at neutral sites in North American cities that do not have women’s hockey—yet. The next tour game will be Ottawa v. Minnesota on March 7 in Raleigh, NC, but Boston’s next takeover is on March 29 in St. Louis, MO, where they will take on the Charge for a rematch.
These cities are being considered as potential expansion options, with teams possibly announced in 2-4 weeks, according to the league’s executive vice president of business operations, Amy Scheer. The PWHL pushed back their trade deadline from March 2 to the 13th, likely to account for a decision on expansion teams. Because these added teams could compete as soon as next season, the choice to expand will impact many other decisions, such as building a schedule around the 2026 Olympics and holding a player draft/trading draft picks.
The Fleet’s next home game is Saturday, March 8, against the first-ranked Montréal Victoire at 2 p.m. at the Tsongas Center in Lowell, Massachusetts.
