'We won't give up': How the PWHL sold out Madison Square Garden

Stan Kasten was in heights schooltime the number one clip he stepped interior Madison Square Garden in 1968.

Months earlier, the New York City arena that was then called "the new Garden" opened its doors for the first time. Kasten, who grew up across the river on a farm in New Jersey, paid 50 cents to get in to watch his first NBA game.

Nearly 60 years later, Kasten alternated between sitting in a suite and walking through the concourse at Madison Square Garden, where a game between the New York Sirens and Seattle Torrent broke the U.S. Attendance record when 18,006 fans showed up on April 4.

The veteran sports executive has worked in multiple major leagues and won championships — most recently, back-to-back titles with the MLB's Los Angeles Dodgers. Kasten is the Dodgers' president.

"But I tell people all the time, with all the cool things I've been lucky enough to be around, there's very little I'm prouder of than where we are with the PWHL," said Kasten, a PWHL advisory board member who owner, Mark Walter, tasked with bringing the league to life a few years ago. "Yes, we're still in startup mode and that will probably be true for a few more years, but we’re off to a really good start."

The PWHL has struggled to draw fans consistently to Sirens' games since the league's launch in January 2024. The low point was a Wednesday night game in March 2024 inside Total Mortgage Arena in Connecticut, where the Sirens played some of its home games during its first season. Only 728 fans were there that night.

But even as attendance has sat at the bottom of the league, PWHL executives have maintained that it needs to keep a presence in New York, no matter how long it takes to build a fan base. They believe it's a market that's necessary to draw a U.S. Broadcasting rights deal, one of the key ways that sports leagues make money.

That's also why the league has pursued aggressive expansion, just three years into its existence.

It's a bet on the league's long-term success, and the league's commitment to New York offers a window into that strategy.

"That's been a challenge for us, finding the right building and the right dates [for the Sirens]," Kasten said. "But we are still searching and we won't give up because we know the market is great. We know there are great hockey fans there and fans of women's hockey there. So we will keep at it because we feel very strongly about having a presence in New York."

When he was hired a few months before puck drop on Jan. 1, 2024, Pascal Daoust, who had run a QMJHL team before being hired to steer the New York team's ship, wasn't just tasked with building a team from scratch.

Daoust, like the rest of the PWHL's general managers, was also painting walls, building desks and hiring staff.

"We sometimes feel that we’ve been doing this for 10 years because there has been so much in a short window of time," Daoust said about those feverish first few months.

The league launched six teams from scratch in about six months. So gargantuan was the job at hand that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman advised Kasten to wait a year.

"He was right, but there were a lot of players for whom that was not right," Kasten said.

Moving forward on such short notice also meant a scramble to find venues for teams. That first season, the New York team split home games between arenas in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. The team also struggled on the ice, finishing last in the standings.

Sirens rally in 3rd period to edge Sceptres

Last season, the team moved to New Jersey full-time. They play at Prudential Center, home of the NHL's New Jersey Devils, and train about a half-hour drive away at Essex County Codey Arena, the Devils' former practice facility.

It's only now, in the second season in New Jersey, that Daoust feels his team can focus more on the hockey.

"It’s going to mean a lot for us to finally have maybe a start with the full foundation in place," the GM said. "Of course, there’s always room to grow. But finally, I would say that we’re going to be more 90 per cent into hockey and 10 per cent on the home staging."

The hockey side has included a full rebuild with around top draft picks, such as Sarah Fillier, Kristýna Kaltounková and Manhattan-born Casey O'Brien. It was that youth and skill the team leaned into when marketing the game at Madison Square Garden, where some of the advertising included players' faces on subway trains.

That was part of the marketing plan, and so was building on momentum from the Olympics in February.

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The league predicted, and planned, to use the Olympics as a "launchpad' to sell the PWHL.

But according to Kasten, they didn't predict the U.S. Women winning Olympic gold, and exactly how much impact that would have on interest in women's hockey.

A week after the sold-out Madison Square Garden game, the Boston Fleet and Montreal Victoire sold out TD Garden, typically home to the NHL's Boston Bruins.

The Minnesota Frost's first home game after the Olympics drew more than 11,000 fans, the highest attendance inside Grand Casino Arena (formerly the Xcel Energy Center) since the Minnesota team's debut game in January 2024.

The story was similar in Seattle, where the Torrent drew more than 17,000 fans, a season high, in the first game after the Olympics.

More than 6,200 fans were at the Prudential Center on Wednesday to watch the Sirens defeat the Toronto Sceptres, a team they're fighting for the final playoff spot.

It's far from the consistent numbers the league has attracted in Canadian markets, or in Minnesota or Seattle. But it's the best crowd the Sirens have drawn yet for a weeknight game at Prudential Center.

"We're only three years into building what we want to build in the New York market, but that's not a lot of time," Kasten said.

"Three years ago today, we were still a blank sheet of paper and yet here we are. We're being patient, we're continuing to invest, which is my euphemism for lose money. But that's OK, because we think we're on the right track long term. We've never been more confident about the ultimate outcome for this league."

Drawing 18,000 fans to Madison Square Garden for one game is different than drawing thousands to New Jersey consistently.

It's something the team is working on through a partnership with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), to try to communicate how fans can get to games via public transit.

One thing that makes Daoust believe it wasn't just a one-off was how fans reacted after the Sirens won the Madison Square Garden game in overtime.

The Sirens' staff members were invited on to the ice to take a family photo. It took 10 or 15 minutes after the game to get everyone together, and the stands were still mostly full of fans, cheering them on.

"They were not just coming to watch the game," Daoust said. "They were coming to watch something unique, and something that is not a one-shot deal, I hope."

“Coming off the electric energy of the Winter Olympics, where we watched Team USA capture gold in an unforgettable overtime thriller, Americans are hungry for more world-class women’s hockey," Scripps president and CEO, Adam Symonds, said in a league press release when the deal was announced.

Next up is expansion, where between two and four teams will be added to the league ahead of next season. That announcement is coming "soon," Kasten said.

Vancouver and Seattle were announced as expansion teams last April, and the league is certain to keep growing its U.S. Footprint.

Every team the league adds costs more money, and the league is "losing a lot more money."

"We knew we were going to have to spend a lot to make this league work, and we're going to continue to spend because we know it will work," Kasten said. "We know it will pay off. The fact that it hasn't yet, in just our third year, it doesn't rattle us at all. It doesn't shake our confidence at all."

But being a six- or eight-team league doesn't bring the league closer to its "next step" of securing the coveted broadcast deal, the economic lens through which the PWHL sees its growth.

Goldeneyes pot 3 goals in the 2nd defeating Torrent, Vancouver playoff hopes still alive

That's why the league hasn't taken the same approach as the WNBA or NWSL, where expansion teams are announced upwards of a year before they begin play.

"For the market, for sponsors, for media and an eight-team league isn’t that exciting, that enticing," Kasten said. "We need to have a bigger footprint to get the kind of deals we need to make this pay off for our players. And so if we know where we're going, let's not waste time getting there."

For the players, it will mean more jobs in a landscape where there's no other professional league in North America where they can play.

More teams and a bigger broadcast deal also means more eyes on the game, and more games inside arenas like Madison Square Garden.

"It was awesome," Sirens' forward Sarah Fillier said after her team's win. "I’d love to be able to come back here."

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