Following the announcement last week of a new team in Detroit, the Professional Women’s Hockey League is continuing its expansion spree with the addition of teams in Hamilton and Las Vegas.
The league officially announced on Thursday, May 13, that the new teams would take the ice at the start of the 2026-27 season. Both teams also unveiled placeholder logos in their respective colour schemes: gold, maroon and cream for Hamilton and olive green and gold for Las Vegas.
The PWHL’s expansion to Hamilton and Las Vegas recognizes two distinct markets and opportunities for the league. Hamilton boasts one of the largest and most concentrated areas in the world for girls’ hockey participation, with a community that has rallied for a professional hockey team of their own for generations, while Las Vegas is North America’s entertainment mecca and home to a community that has proudly adopted and embraced hockey and women’s sports.
— PWHL press release
The Hamilton team will play its home games at the newly renovated TD Coliseum, which will also be home to the New York Islanders’ American Hockey League affiliate starting in 2026-27. Gold was chosen as one of the team’s colours as a nod to the city’s former NHL club, the Hamilton Tigers, as well as the CFL‘s Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Meanwhile, maroon “pays homage to Steeltown by representing the color of aged steel.”
Hamilton hosted a PWHL Takeover Tour game between the Seattle Torrent and the Toronto Sceptres on January 3, 2026, which drew more than 16,000 fans to TD Coliseum. The league also notes that the Greater Golden Horseshoe features one of the strongest regions in the world for girls and women’s hockey participation and development, exemplified by more than 15% of PWHL players hailing from the area.”
Las Vegas, meanwhile, has never hosted a Takeover Tour game, but the league cited the city being “one of the fastest-growing sports and entertainment destinations in North America [that] has proven its appetite to embrace both hockey and women’s sports at the highest level” as its reasons for expanding there.
The team’s colour palette is meant to evoke the natural tones of Southern Nevada. “While Las Vegas is known for The Strip, the area is beloved by the community for its natural surroundings. Green and golden yellow represent the beauty of the desert and mountains that encircle Las Vegas, while gold is a nod to the glamour of what makes Vegas, Vegas.”
The Las Vegas team will share T-Mobile Arena with the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights, who supported the expansion process.
As other first-year PWHL teams have done in the past, Hamilton and Las Vegas will likely wear jerseys with the city name diagonally across the front in their inaugural season. The names of the teams were not announced on Wednesday.
With the two PWHL expansion teams in 2025-26 — the Vancouver Goldeneyes and the Seattle Torrent — jerseys were launched in late October, with nicknames and logos following in early November. The season started in late November.
The PWHL is expected to announce one more expansion team for the 2026-27 season soon, with San Jose being the odds-on favourite as a landing spot.
