I grew up in Las Vegas playing street hockey and watching the Thunder in the 90s. Professional hockey here for the last decade has meant the Golden Knights, so I want the first women’s team in town to succeed, and I’m saying that before anything else.
PWHL Las Vegas plays its home opener Dec. 6 at T-Mobile Arena against Detroit, with puck drop at 5 p.m. PT. Camp opens Nov. 18 with 29 players invited, and the coaching staff has been complete since Sep 30. These are the five questions I’m watching.
1. How much of the offense can start on the blue line?
Kendall Cooper, from Oakville, Ont., played her first PWHL season with Minnesota after being selected sixth overall in the 2025 draft out of Quinnipiac. She finished with 19 points, two goals and 17 assists, in 30 games. That tied her for second among PWHL rookies behind New York’s Casey O’Brien, who had 22.
Mae Batherson joins from the same Minnesota blue line. The St. Lawrence graduate was a sixth-round pick, No. 33 overall in 2024, and finished last season with three goals, 12 assists and a plus-10 rating in 30 games.
Erin Ambrose anchors the group. She has 37 points in 73 PWHL games, and she led all NCAA Division I defenders in scoring with 50 points at Clarkson in 2013-14. She also lifted the Walter Cup with Montréal in May. At the Sept. 23 welcome tour at T-Mobile Arena, she told Her Ice:
“After being able to hoist the Walter Cup in May, there’s nothing else I want to do than do that again. So the sooner the better.”
Erin Ambrose, PWHL Las Vegas defender
If Cooper and Batherson repeat last season’s production and Ambrose adds to it, the blue line can produce from the first game.
2. Which forwards break out?
Head coach Kim Weiss has described the team she wants. “I like to think of myself as an offensive coach, so we’re going to be fast, we’re going to be physical,” she said at the welcome tour. She named Katy Knoll and Natalie Snodgrass as the kind of players the staff targeted. “We wanted competitive people that love winning.”
The returning forwards bring real production. Hayley Scamurra had eight goals and eight assists in 30 games for Montréal last season, and Knoll scored seven goals in 30 games for Minnesota, then had five points in eight playoff games in 2025. Maureen Murphy has scored a goal in each of the last three postseasons. Snodgrass tied for the Whitecaps' scoring lead in 2022-23 with 10 goals and 20 points in 22 games, and she arrives in a system built around speed.
Six rookie forwards add to the pool: Lacey Eden, the No. 5 pick and a four-time NCAA champion, plus Tessa Janecke, Issy Wunder, Josefin Bouveng, Alexis Petford and Sydney Healey. None has played a PWHL game yet, which gives Weiss plenty of options when camp decides the lines.
3. What does a veteran goaltender bring to a lineup with six rookie forwards?
Nicole Hensley arrives with more big-game experience than anyone on the roster. Her PWHL playoff record is a 1.57 goals-against average and a .928 save percentage in eight games across the 2024 and 2025 postseasons, including a 1.06 average and two shutouts in five games in 2024. In three PWHL regular seasons, she has 21 wins in 38 games with a 2.46 average. She is a two-time Olympian, with gold in 2018 and silver in 2022, and has won three world championship golds.
Her goaltending coach is Brad Kirkwood, who spent three seasons with the Toronto Sceptres and has worked with Canada’s national women’s team since 2015. He runs Top Prospects Goaltending Canada. Four goaltenders are in camp: Hensley, Logan Angers, Lauren Bench and Saskia Maurer.
For a young forward group, playing in front of a goaltender who has been through it before gives the rookies room to learn.
4. How fast can a new roster and staff become a team?
General manager Dominique DiDia was hired in May, and the expansion draft came 10 days later.
Weiss and DiDia share a long history. They met at Trinity College, where Weiss was already captain when DiDia arrived as a freshman. “Her leadership has been a part of my life since I was 18 years old,” DiDia said.
Weiss says her staff is learning the roster in real time.
“We’re like kids with Legos. If you have players, you just start to build lines.”
Kim Weiss, head coach
Familiarity should shorten that timeline. Fourteen of the 29 players on the camp roster spent last season on one of three clubs: six from Minnesota, four from Montréal and four from Seattle. Cooper, Batherson and Knoll each played all 30 games together for the Frost last season, with Hensley in goal for 13 of them. Ambrose and Murphy have been Montréal teammates since the league’s first season, and Scamurra joined them in 2025. That gives Weiss existing pairs and lines to build from.
Assistant Ryan Smith spent 11 seasons in head and associate coaching roles in the WHL, most recently as associate head coach of the Regina Pats. Assistant Jonathan Matsumoto, a 2006 Flyers third-round pick, played about 1,000 games as a pro. Brendan Flanagan handles video.
5. What will home ice sound like?
Every opponent visits Las Vegas this season, 11 in all. The first four home games bring Detroit on Dec. 6, Minnesota on Dec. 10, Boston on Dec. 26 and New York on Dec. 29. Montréal visits on Feb. 23. One home game, Detroit on April 13, is at Lee’s Family Forum in Henderson.
Those dates are the first test of the building. DiDia has said what she hopes for. “We expect our fans, and we want our fans and want the community to be just as loud and just as excited,” she said. Ambrose has her own pitch for anyone undecided: “If you walk in and watch a female hockey game, you will want to watch another game.”
Dec. 6 is the first answer.
