8: Existing teams. 3: Phase 1 slots. 6: Total by Phase 3. 4: Max lost per team Updated May 8 after fair criticism on the original post in r/PWHL . Two real bugs surfaced. One reader pointed out that 'there's no benefit to protect a UFA in Phase 3': a UFA who isn't on the Phase 1 list has signed an EFO with an expansion team or gone elsewhere on the open market by the time Phase 3 opens, so the original team can't actually use a Phase 3 slot on her. The model was treating Phase 1 and Phase 3 as two independent top-N rankings without rules awareness. Another reader caught the symptom: 'lol at Pou not being protected in Phase 1 and somehow being available for protection in Phase 3.' And a third put it bluntly: 'there is 0 chance Boston doesn't protect Keller in Phase 1.' Older stars and top defenders were getting pushed down by limitations of the model that this update tries to address. This version ranks Phase 1 by what each player has been worth across her recent seasons, before the aging adjustment, so a 35-year-old captain with strong full-season inputs isn't penalized twice. Phase 3 is restricted to SIGNED and RFA players, since UFAs who aren't on the Phase 1 list are gone by then. Defenders and goalies get a small ranking bump to account for value the underlying model can't measure directly: zone exits, transition defence, the fact that a team only has one starter goalie. The ratings themselves haven't changed, only how the protect lists are built from them. Methodology section at the bottom has the full mechanics. The 2026 PWHL expansion is a five-phase signing process, not a traditional draft. Existing teams get three protection slots in Phase 1 (May 28 to 30) and three more in Phase 3 (June 6 to 9) , capped at four contracted players lost across the whole window. The wrinkle from last year's Seattle/Vancouver process: free agents are no longer auto-exempt. If you want to keep a player whose deal expires, you have to re-sign her into a protect slot, which means a Phase 1 protect can be either a contracted player or a fresh signing. The expansion teams build 10-player core rosters via two new contract instruments, the Expansion Franchise Offer (binding, four-year max, minimum the greater of $100k or 2025-26 salary) and the Foundational Player Offer (two-year, $80k then $82.5k), so the cost of protecting goes up too. You'll notice the cards below jump from Phase 1 to Phase 3 with no Phase 2 in between. That's because the five phases interleave. Existing teams declare protections in Phases 1 and 3. Expansion teams take their first swing at unprotected players in Phase 2 (and again in Phase 4) by signing up to five players from their 20-name negotiation list. Phase 5 is open signing. So when a card shows 'Phase 1 protect' and 'Phase 3 protect', those are the only two windows where existing teams act, with one expansion-team window between them. Two ingredients drive the lists below. First, projected 2026-27 GSVA : each player's PWHL Game Score above replacement is blended across their last three seasons (60% / 30% / 10% recency weights, gated on games actually played), shrunk toward the position median when the sample is thin, and then run through a position-specific age curve anchored to opening night 2026-27. The output is what we expect this player to be worth next year, not what she was last year. Second, each player's 2026-27 contract status : SIGNED (under contract, slot is costless), UFA (pending unrestricted free agent, must be re-signed to use a slot), and RFA (restricted, also requires re-signing). Each card carries the contract status as a small badge, and each row shows the player's age at projection (opening night 2026-27). The eight protect lists Five things the lists tell us Goalies anchor most Phase 1 lists. 4 of the 8 teams put a goaltender in their three-slot Phase 1, and 3 have a goaltender as their #1 overall by projected value. Pulling more than one season into the rating tones down the goalie dominance you'd see if you only looked at this year, but the top of the position still drives most teams' first protect.. The league's top tier sits inside a single-season's worth of normal variation : Sophie Jaques (VAN, +26.5), Sarah Fillier (NY, +25.7), Taylor Heise (MIN, +25.7), Aerin Frankel (BOS, +25.7), Gwyneth Philips (OTT, +25.4). In other words, ordering them #1 vs #5 isn't meaningful at this sample size; they're effectively tied. None will be available.. Re-sign cost is unevenly distributed. Across the eight protect lists, the teams whose top 3 include a UFA or RFA are: MIN (3 of 3), SEA (3 of 3), TOR (3 of 3), VAN (2 of 3), NY (1 of 3), OTT (1 of 3). Those teams are looking at a binding Expansion Franchise Offer (minimum the greater of $100k or 2025-26 salary, up to four years) plus the protect slot itself. Everyone else is mostly clicking checkboxes.. Every team is losing somebody good. A roster of 22 skaters plus 2-3 goalies cannot fit everyone worth keeping into six slots. The 'Exposed' row on each card is the best player not on either list, the most painful single loss the team is leaving on the table. A real expansion team will sign whoever fits their build rather than the model's #7, but #7 is the worst-case loss. A SIGNED label on that row means an expansion team can sign her directly; a UFA or RFA label means there's still a negotiation, and the original team has a last shot in Phase 4.. Defence is where the model is weakest. Even with the +1.5 defender bump applied to rankings, plenty of Phase 1 lists end up with two forwards and a goalie, leaving a blue line that's exposed. Some of that is real (forwards score more, starter goalies are unique). Some of it is the rating still missing parts of defending it can't see, like zone exits and transition work. The bump narrows the gap; it doesn't close it.. The cap math binds. The PWHL is targeting four expansion franchises that need 10-player core rosters: 40 signed players to absorb. The eight existing teams can lose at most four contracted players each: 32 max losable. That's a 40-vs-32 mismatch before any team has even drawn up its protect list. The delta has to come from somewhere, and the only place it can come from is the unrestricted free-agent pool: expansion teams will end up signing UFAs that no existing team had to expose. Which means the post-expansion roster turnover is going to be larger than the loss cap suggests, and the teams with the most UFA depth (which by GSVA happens to be Minnesota, Toronto, and Seattle) are the ones who lose the most non-protected talent without any of it counting against their cap. Easy Phase 1, hard Phase 1 BOS is the cleanest case in the league. Aerin Frankel , Haley Winn , and Megan Keller are all already signed for 2026-27. Boston Fleet's Phase 1 is paperwork: three boxes to check before May 30, no money to spend, no negotiations to run. MIN is the opposite. Their three highest-projected players ( Kendall Coyne Schofield , Taylor Heise , and Kelly Pannek ) are all pending UFAs. To use a Phase 1 protect slot on any of them, the front office has to sign a new contract before May 30, on a binding offer of at least $100k or last year's salary, for one to four years. Three players, three new contracts, three days. The plot twist: if any of those negotiations doesn't close in time (a player wants more years, or wants to test the market, or has a no-trade ask the front office isn't ready to grant), that player drops into the negotiation pool the expansion teams shop in Phase 2. The PWHL is targeting four new franchises for 2026-27 (Detroit and Denver are widely reported as front-runners; the league hadn't officially named cities as of this post). The original team can try to bring her back in Phase 3, but by then a new team may already be deep in talks. SEA and TOR are in the same situation. All three of each team's top-projected players are also UFAs. The teams the model rates highest at the top of their roster are also the teams with the most Phase 1 paperwork in front of them. One step down, VAN has 2 of 3 in their top-projected players unsigned for 2026-27. Pressure is real there too, just slightly less than the all-three-UFAs cohort. BOS gets to read the paper while everyone else negotiates. The four EFOs, who's actually exposed An Expansion Franchise Offer is the only coercive instrument in this whole process. Each expansion team gets exactly one. With four new franchises in 2026, that's four binding offers across the entire signing window. The minimum is the greater of $100k or last year's salary, on a term the player picks (1 to 4 years), fully guaranteed, with a $20k upfront bonus and 3% annual raises baked in for any multi-year deal. The player can decline, but if she does, she has to sign for at least 90% of the EFO amount with whichever team she ends up with. That floor is the leverage: an EFO sets her market price even if she walks. An EFO can only be tendered to a UFA. So the actual EFO threat surface is the league's top UFAs by projected value. Here are the six highest-projected UFAs across all eight rosters (the realistic target pool, since expansion teams will not all chase the same name). MIN Taylor Heise (F, +25.7 projected GSVA, Phase 1) : in their team's Phase 1 list, conditional on a Phase 1 re-sign.. TOR Daryl Watts (F, +23.6 projected GSVA, Phase 1) : in their team's Phase 1 list, conditional on a Phase 1 re-sign.. MIN Kelly Pannek (F, +23.3 projected GSVA, Phase 1) : in their team's Phase 1 list, conditional on a Phase 1 re-sign.. SEA Jessie Eldridge (F, +21.9 projected GSVA, Phase 1) : in their team's Phase 1 list, conditional on a Phase 1 re-sign.. MIN Grace Zumwinkle (F, +21.2 projected GSVA, exposed) : exposed unless re-signed before Phase 2 opens.. MTL Abby Roque (F, +20.9 projected GSVA, exposed) : exposed unless re-signed before Phase 2 opens. 4 of the top 6 sit in their team's Phase 1 protect list, which means their original team can shut down the EFO threat for those players by closing a re-sign before May 30. The rest are exposed unless their team negotiates faster than the expansion teams do. With only four EFOs to spend across the league, expansion teams will rank these targets, decide which one fits their team-build, and deploy the binding offer where it has the highest signing probability. Everyone else they want to add in Phase 2 comes via FPO (non-binding, 2-year, $80k/$82.5k) or open negotiation, which the original team can compete on. The must-sign protections These are the players ranked top-3 on their team by GSVA who are not already signed for 2026-27. Every one of them costs a protect slot AND a fresh binding offer. If a team chooses not to re-sign, the player goes to the ENTL pool and an expansion team can negotiate freely starting Phase 2. MIN Kendall Coyne Schofield (F, +20.2 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. MIN Taylor Heise (F, +25.7 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. MIN Kelly Pannek (F, +23.3 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. NY Casey O'Brien (F, +21.9 projected GSVA) is a RFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. OTT Brianne Jenner (F, +14.7 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. SEA Jessie Eldridge (F, +21.9 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. SEA Alex Carpenter (F, +19.1 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. SEA Hilary Knight (F, +12.7 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. TOR Daryl Watts (F, +23.6 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. TOR Raygan Kirk (G, +15.3 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. TOR Renata Fast (D, +14.4 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. VAN Claire Thompson (D, +17.7 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot.. VAN Sarah Nurse (F, +16.4 projected GSVA) is a UFA for 2026-27. Protecting her means a re-sign, not just a slot. The hardest cuts These are the 'best player off the list' picks ranked across the league. The team would protect them in any world where they had four slots in Phase 1, but they don't, so on paper these are the most-valuable players exposed to expansion contact across the full window. MIN Grace Zumwinkle (F, +21.2 projected GSVA) is the team's best player exposed. She's a UFA who didn't make Phase 1, so once Phase 2 opens she's fair game for any of the four expansion teams. The original team can try to bring her back in Phase 4, but by then a new team is usually deep in talks.. MTL Abby Roque (F, +20.9 projected GSVA) is the team's best player exposed. She's a UFA who didn't make Phase 1, so once Phase 2 opens she's fair game for any of the four expansion teams. The original team can try to bring her back in Phase 4, but by then a new team is usually deep in talks.. SEA Julia Gosling (F, +20.5 projected GSVA) is the team's best player exposed. She's a UFA who didn't make Phase 1, so once Phase 2 opens she's fair game for any of the four expansion teams. The original team can try to bring her back in Phase 4, but by then a new team is usually deep in talks.. VAN Jenn Gardiner (F, +17.9 projected GSVA) is the team's best player exposed. She's a UFA who didn't make Phase 1, so once Phase 2 opens she's fair game for any of the four expansion teams. The original team can try to bring her back in Phase 4, but by then a new team is usually deep in talks. What changed, and what the model still gets wrong Three rankings in the first cut drew most of the pushback, and all three are fixed here. The ratings themselves haven't changed; only how the protect lists get built from them. Poulin moves into MTL Phase 1. The first version was double-counting her age, once in her career value and again on a noisy read of this season, and the two together pushed her down to Phase 3. Phase 1 now ranks players by what they've been worth across their recent seasons, before the aging adjustment. Lines up with what every Montreal fan was going to tell you anyway. Keller moves into BOS Phase 1. The small bump for defenders is the model admitting that the parts of defending it can see (chances created, chances suppressed at the moment of the shot) don't capture all of what a top-pair D actually does, like zone exits, gap control, killing rushes before they become shots. The trade-off is Müller dropping to Phase 3, which several readers said was the right call. Boston's three keepers are Frankel, Winn, and Keller. Fast moves into TOR Phase 1. Same reason as Keller. By the metrics the model can see, her impact this season was inside the noise band. By the metrics it can't see, playing the league's hardest minutes against the toughest matchups on a team being outscored at 5v5, she's a Defender of the Year candidate. The defender bump tilts the close call toward where the eye-test already was. Two changes we're less sure about. Coyne Schofield jumps into MIN Phase 1 alongside Heise and Pannek. That's three UFAs in Phase 1 for Minnesota, which means three re-signs in three days. The model is saying these are the three Frost players most worth keeping; it isn't pricing how hard those three negotiations actually are. A real GM might protect Curl-Salemme in Phase 1 instead and try to bring Coyne Schofield back later via Phase 3 or 4. Knight in SEA Phase 1 looks similarly aggressive on age (she's 37), but the Reddit consensus was emphatic that protecting Captain America is non-negotiable, so we'll trust the eye-test on that one. What this version still doesn't get right. The defender bump is a tilt, not a fix; the underlying rating still can't see transition defence or zone-exit credit. The aging curve is a best-guess shape, not something fit on PWHL data, and it bites hardest on older players with thin recent samples. Goalie ratings on a 30-game starter sample carry enough variance that any team's goalie-vs-top-forward Phase 1 boundary should be read as a coin flip. The next version of this should price how likely each re-sign actually closes (a star UFA whose talks are stuck is more exposed than a star UFA whose deal is 90% done), and simulate Phase 2 to model who the expansion teams would actually claim. Both are projects for next offseason, not this signing window. And the case the model and the eye agree on: Brianne Jenner clears Ottawa's Phase 1 cut at age 35 because her RAPM is full-season and positive. Same age penalty as Poulin, but with non-noisy inputs the projection still puts her in the top three. This is the cleanest case where the model's machinery is doing what it's supposed to. What this read isn't Not a GM's list. Real protection decisions weight age, contract length, locker room fit, marketing, draft equity, and the cap. GSVA is good at one thing: how much value did this player create on the ice this year. It's a strong starting frame, not the final answer.. Not a forecast of who actually gets signed. Expansion teams have priorities of their own (foundational stars vs depth, geographic ties, agent relationships) and the ENTL is a 20-player negotiation list that we don't see. The exposed players above are available ; whether any expansion team takes the swing is a different question.. The goalie ratings are noisy. A 30-game starter sample carries enough variance that you should not read +35 GSVA Frankel versus +34 Desbiens as a real ordering. They're tied. We still rate goalies because the alternative is vibes, but treat the top of the position as a cluster, not a leaderboard. Methodology Per-game Game Score is the weighted sum of skater offence (goals 0.75, primary assists 0.70, secondary assists 0.55, shots 0.075), 5-on-5 territorial play (raw on-ice shot attempts for / against, ±0.05 each, a count and not a share), shot blocks (0.05), faceoff wins / losses (±0.01), penalties taken (-0.15), and on-ice goal differential (0.15). For the on-ice term, The on-ice goal-differential term uses the player's RAPM-derived isolated impact (regularized adjusted plus-minus: a ridge regression on every 5-on-5 xG event with one regressor per player, controlling for teammates and competition) rather than the league's box-score plus-minus. The conversion is direct: per-60 RAPM total × season TOI in hours = season xG impact, which is goal-equivalent at our xG model's calibration. Players below the RAPM TOI floor (~10 minutes for the season) fall back to true 5-on-5 on-ice GF − GA from the play-by-play. The goalie component is GSAx-based: 0.75 × (xGA − GA) per game. The skater weights are Daniel Luszczyszyn's NHL Game Score formulation; the calibration to standings points is fitted on team-season totals from our own data.. Single-season GSVA = (player GS-per-60 − replacement GS-per-60) × player TOI. Replacement is the 10th percentile of GS-per-60 within each position bucket (F, D, G), among players hitting 5+ games and 10+ minutes TOI.. Projected 2026-27 GSVA is computed in three stages. Stage 1, recency blend: per-season GSVA averaged across the last three PWHL regular seasons with weights 0.60 / 0.30 / 0.10, mass-weighted by games played within each season so a 5-game half-season doesn't drag a 30-game sample. Stage 2, shrinkage: when a player's total blended games-played is below 30 (across all blended seasons), we shrink toward the position median; shrinkage decays to half-trust at 8 games, no shrinkage at 30+. Stage 3, age adjustment: a piecewise-linear age curve per position (forward peak around 24-26, defender 26-28, goalie 27-29) applied at the player's age on opening night 2026-27. The peak ages line up with the women's-hockey aging-curve literature in Schuckers / Curro et al.; the slope shapes are our own and conservative on the decline side.. The aging curve is a documented prior, not a data fit. A delta-method fit from our own panel (year-over-year ∆ GSVA-per-60 by age and position) has obvious survivor-bias artifacts at the older tails: forwards trend upward at 31-34 in the empirical data, which isn't biology, it's the players who've already fallen off being absent from the panel. We use a documented piecewise-linear curve instead (forward peak 24-26, defender 26-28, goalie 27-29) and revisit when more PWHL seasons are available.. IIHF as a hierarchical prior, not a free term. Across 71 IIHF-matched PWHL players, IIHF goals-per-event predicts PWHL GSVA-per-game with r = +0.33 (R² ≈ 0.11). That's real but small: the regression explains about 11% of the variance, so we use IIHF as the direction of the shrinkage target, not the magnitude. For each PWHL player who appears in the IIHF leaderboard, we predict her PWHL season GSVA from the fit (intercept 0.34, slope 0.27, scaled to a 30-game season), then the shrinkage step pulls her PWHL blend toward that personal target rather than toward a generic position median. The shrinkage weight fades to zero at 30+ PWHL games-played, so veterans are untouched and the prior only does real work for rookies and thin samples. The single largest individual effect on the current grid is on the order of 1-2 GSVA (e.g., Kaltounková at 21 PWHL GP picks up roughly +1.3 GSVA from the IIHF shrinkage target vs the position-median fallback), well inside the noise floor of any individual season's rating.. Other things still not in the rating. No zone-exit or zone-entry credit for defenders. The aging curve remains a documented prior, not a data-fit. RAPM is xG-event based: it sees scoring chances controlling for context, but it does not see transition defence, takeaways, or off-puck contributions that don't show up at the moment of a shot. Treat the rankings as a defensible best-guess of next-year value; the order inside the top of any team's list is roughly tied.. Contract status reflects each player's 2026-27 contractual standing: SIGNED (under contract), FREE AGENT (rendered UFA), and RESTRICTED FA (RFA). Niche statuses (RESERVE, 10 DAYS) render their raw label.. Roster filter : minimum 8 PWHL regular-season games played across the blended seasons (i.e., a player needs 8+ GP cumulative across 23-24, 24-25, 25-26 to qualify, not 8+ in any one season). Below that the small-sample noise swamps signal even with the shrinkage step; above it the rating is stable enough to rank within a roster.. How the protect lists are built (updated May 8). Phase 1 ranks each team by their players' recent-seasons value, before the aging adjustment, plus a small bump for defenders (+1.5) and goalies (+2.5) to account for value the model doesn't capture directly. Phase 3 ranks the rest of the roster by next-year projected value (the aging curve does apply here), but only signed players and RFAs are eligible: a UFA who isn't protected in Phase 1 has either signed an EFO with an expansion team or signed elsewhere by the time Phase 3 opens. The exposed row at the bottom of each card is just the best player not on either list, contract status noted. The defender and goalie bumps only affect the rank order on the cards; the GSVA number shown on each row, and the GSVA used everywhere else on the site, doesn't include them.. Sources for the expansion rules cited above : The Hockey News (five-phase breakdown, Phase 1 / Phase 3 protection counts, EFO and FPO contract terms, four-player-loss cap), Yahoo Sports (free-agent treatment, signing-bonus rules, expansion roster size), and The Ice Garden / The IX (phase timeline, ENTL mechanics).. Numbers regenerate on every build. A PBP re-sync, a finalized regular-season game, or a GSVA recalibration all reshape the protect lists on the next static export. Full GSVA leaderboards by team and by season live at /stats?tab=gsva . Per-team rosters with deployment, matchup, and expected-goals breakdowns live under /teams .