Ottawa Nationals

Lore & Background

The WHA originally granted a franchise to Doug Michel for 'Ontario,' with plans to play at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, but a favourable lease could not be obtained. Hamilton was then expected to be the home, but the team was eventually placed in Ottawa. Nick Trbovich became majority owner before the season began, with Michel running hockey operations. The team was coached by Billy Harris and led on the ice by Wayne Carleton, who scored 42 goals and 92 points during the season. They hosted the first-ever WHA game on October 11, 1972, losing 7–4 to the Alberta Oilers. Their home arena was the Ottawa Civic Centre, but they were a flop at the box office, averaging about 3,000 fans per game. Owing to a dispute with the city of Ottawa, the Nationals elected to play their playoff games at Maple Leaf Gardens rather than their regular season home. The equipment for the team was placed in Maple Leaf Gardens on the eve of Game 1. The team called themselves the 'Ontario Nationals' for the playoffs. After the season, the team was sold to John F. Bassett and became the Toronto Toros.

Reader's Guide

The Ottawa Nationals' significance lies in their role as one of the original WHA franchises and as the host of the league's inaugural game. Despite only existing for one season, they helped launch the WHA, which competed with the NHL and eventually led to the NHL's expansion and the absorption of several WHA teams. The team's brief tenure in Ottawa was marked by poor attendance and a dispute with the city, forcing them to play playoff games in Toronto under the name 'Ontario Nationals.' Their sale and relocation to Toronto as the Toros ended Ottawa's first major professional hockey venture outside the NHL. The last Ottawa Nationals player active in North American major professional hockey was Mike Amodeo, who played one season in the NHL with the Winnipeg Jets in 1979–80 before moving to Europe. The team's legacy is as a footnote in the WHA's history, illustrating the league's early instability and the challenges of establishing a rival hockey league.

Did You Know?

• Due to a dispute with the city of Ottawa, the Nationals played their playoff games at Maple Leaf Gardens and called themselves the 'Ontario Nationals.'
• The team averaged only about 3,000 fans per game at the Ottawa Civic Centre.

Charter Status & First Signings

Ottawa was one of six founding cities selected when the Mark Walter Group unveiled the PWHL in August 2023, joining Boston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Montreal, New York City, and Toronto. What set Ottawa apart in the league's birth was that the very first three players to commit to any franchise in the new league all chose the Ottawa squad. Emily Clark, Brianne Jenner, and Emerance Maschmeyer signed during the initial ten-day free agency window in the summer of 2023, a period in which each team was permitted to lock in three players. This gave the Ottawa roster a head start before the September draft held at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, where 286 eligible players were available across fifteen rounds. Because the league was still in its infancy, no official nicknames had been assigned before the inaugural season; instead, Ottawa's jerseys featured the city's name rendered in a diagonal wordmark, a temporary identity that would later give way to a proper moniker.

Record-Setting Home Opener

Ottawa's first home game, played on January 2, 2024, at TD Place Arena, drew a crowd of 8,318 fans and set a new attendance benchmark for professional women's ice hockey at the time. That record would be surpassed multiple times over the remainder of the inaugural season, eventually reaching 21,105 at Montreal's Bell Centre in April. The broader context of that opening stretch was extraordinary: just one day earlier, the league's very first game had taken place in Toronto, where New York defeated the host team 4–0 with Ella Shelton scoring the opening goal. That inaugural broadcast captured 2.9 million Canadian television viewers, making it the largest sports or entertainment audience of that day, surpassing even the 2024 NHL Winter Classic. Ottawa's record-setting opener underscored the enormous appetite for women's professional hockey that years of PWHPA advocacy and exhibition play had helped cultivate across the country.

Competitive Framework & the Road to the Walter Cup

Ottawa competes within a twelve-team league—five franchises in Canada and seven in the United States—making it part of the only professional women's hockey league operating in North America. The regular season employs a distinctive 3-2-1-0 points structure: three points for a regulation victory, two for an overtime or shootout win, one for an overtime or shootout loss, and zero for a regulation defeat. Once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, its accumulated regular-season points feed into the "Gold plan," which determines the order of selection for the top pick in the following entry draft. The top four teams advance to the postseason, where the champion is awarded the Walter Cup. On the ice, PWHL rules are modeled on NHL regulations but include innovations such as the "jailbreak" rule, under which a short-handed goal immediately ends the opposing team's penalty. Bodychecking is permitted, though with more restrictions than in the NHL.

Broadcasting & Fan Access

For Ottawa fans and viewers across Canada, the league's games are available through a robust multi-platform broadcast arrangement. CBC/Radio-Canada, TSN, TSN's French-language affiliate RDS, Amazon Prime Video, and Sportsnet all carry PWHL coverage in the Canadian market. This is notably different from the international arrangement, where games are streamed on YouTube for viewers outside Canada. In the United States, coverage is handled by regional sports networks based in each city that hosts a team, while select games also reach audiences in the Czech Republic and Slovakia through Nova Sport. For Ottawa specifically, the combination of national Canadian broadcasters and streaming services means fans have multiple avenues to watch their team compete, whether in person at TD Place Arena or from home. This multi-platform approach reflects the league's ambition to make women's professional hockey widely accessible from its very first season.

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