My PWHL Draft Order

Monday morning at 9:24 am and we still don’t have a PWHL draft order.

I’ll be honest, over the past few days, I have made several jokes about why the order has been released but at this stage, I can’t think of one, good, logical reason.

The teams drafting at this point, have to have MULTIPLE flowcharts to accommodate a myriad of possibilities. The media (I’m still not sure I count myself among that hallowed group) is missing out on opportunities to do speculative articles for each market and the league just isn’t going to get the bump that it should from a major twelve team draft event.

I have received my credentials for both Tuesday and Wednesday.Sadly, the day job is going to get in the way of me attending the Tuesday festivities which include media availability with the top prospects and the awards ceremonies but I will be in full attendance on Wednesday to take in the PWHL Mentorship Program as well as the actual 2026 PWHL Draft. Since we don’t have a draft order, I have taken it upon myself to make up one because that is just the kind of helpful person I am.

At this point, the only reason I can think of, and it isn’t a great reason, is that the draft order will be impacted by the number of players that existing teams have lost in the expansion process.

We already know that Vancouver is drafting first. The expansion teams can then be a random draw between the four teams. I have them slotted at spots 2 – 5 but I could easily see them shifted to the end of the draft sequence as well since it can be argued that they did have an advantage in player selection up front.

The remaining five teams would be “seeded” based on the number of players that they lost in the expansion process and how they finished in the 2025 – 2026 season (regular and playoffs) This gives me a draft order of: Vancouver

San Jose

Las Vegas

Hamilton

Detroit

New York

Minnesota

Montreal

Seattle

Boston

Toronto

Ottawa

Obviously teams are still going to lose a few players so these can move around a bit but without any indication from the league, I figured I’d take a guess. Let me know what you think.