Hilary Knight Believes PWHL Will Help Develop Players All Over World

Hilary Knight has been center stage for women’s hockey for more than a decade, and her legacy continues to grow.

Signing a three-year deal with Boston’s franchise in the Professional Women’s Hockey League on Thursday, Knight is seeing the sport enter into what she believes is a sustainable future for not just herself and her teammates, but young girls across the globe just learning how to play.

“We’ve never seen the nest in the world in one place at this level,” Knight told reporters via teleconference on Thursday. “We see it in respective countries on the world stage but to be able to develop players from all over and to get a different style of play when we play with our countries. It’s very unique to our country’s style of play.

“That’s something that I learned when I lived up in Montreal. I was like, ‘Whoa, these practices are different.’ And just so happened the coach was speaking French and I was like, ‘I have no idea what’s going on.'”

Knight has played on every stage of the sport but has not played with anyone outside of America and Canada. She believes that will change with the inception of the PWHL.

“It’s gonna be awesome because you’re gonna have the best players from Europe. You’re gonna have the best players from North America, Asia. You name it,” Knight said. “Everyone’s going to come here. This is going to be the hot ticket. It’s going to be the destination of places to play.”

Admitting that she gets “giddy” thinking about the future of the league, Knight couldn’t contain her excitement about the future.

“You’ve never seen the hockey minds meet from different countries on the women’s side,” Knight said. “We see it day in and day out on the NHL side, on the men’s side but we’re just scratching the surface here of where we can take the game and development. That’s what’s really exciting.”

It’s not just current players either. Knight believes the league will allow more women to play longer even if they don’t make it to the international stage.

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“What we’re going to see is an awesome super strong pipeline of development,” Knight said. “Then players’ careers potentially go longer, because now we have more funding, more resources, more programming at this level.”

Knight added having the league in place gives players more time to develop their skills instead of not making their country’s national team and not being able to compete at a higher level.

“It will give players time to develop and really grow their game,” Knight said. “I think it’s sort of tragic if you’re not on the national team and you’re done with college, you have no place to play and you have to retire. I think it’s exciting because you’re going to see players really come into their prime when they’ve never had the chance before. I think that’s from a development standpoint, just the whole landscape of women’s hockey at the highest level. That’s what we all want.”