Detroit Used A Familiar Model To Build Their PWHL Roster, But Can They Avoid A Familiar Fate?
PWHL Detroit has built a roster that followed the formula used by the Seattle Torrent last season. It failed miserably in Seattle. Detroit will hope for different results from similar ingredients, benefiting from a fresh league ecosystem, and an experienced coach.
Video Transcript
You know, H- Hillary brings so much, to the team that not only she's a great player, she's amazing in big moment, but it's, also her leadership.
You, you bring someone like Hillary Knight, especially when you're a new team and you're building a new team and to, to create that chemistry right away, it's important, and leadership is key.
And when we were talking to her, again, another player, a desire to win.
She just wanna win.
A- and when you have that desire and you're a key player, a leader, I think it's a, it's a good piece to help our team to gel, sooner than later.
We see it sometime it's hard with expansion team when you have player coming from all over, different coaching experience.
But when you, you put the right piece together c- like that, I think, someone like her help No, I think it's the fact that, you know, we're building something that we wanna win right, right away.
Like, it's not something necessarily that we wanna y- With the way it's done, like, on the women's side, you don't have contract of five to 10 years.
Like, your contracts are so short, so I think the teams are changing a lot just because of, the salary cap is not the same than NHL.
So your window of building something and be successful is shorter than if you were a GM in the NHL where you're like, "Okay, let's build for the future," and maybe you sign someone for eight years and you can really build around them.
So that's the thing we had to look at.
We ha- we were lucky to have a contract of four years with Dara Watts, so we're like, "Okay, this is, like, kind of our window to try to build something very successful."
until they open up to m- more years that we can sign players, I think that's the way you have to look at it.
