Culture

Inside a historic women’s hockey fight and why it changed PWHL rules: ‘We were battling out there’

Published

1 year ago

March 3, 2025

Inside a historic women’s hockey fight and why it changed PWHL rules: ‘We were battling out there’

For almost a decade, Jill Saulnier was an energy line forward for the Canadian women’s national team, winning two Olympic medals and a world championship.

Now she can add a new line to her resume: She threw the first real punches in the history of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, in a fight with Ottawa forward Tereza Vanišová.

“We were battling out there,” Saulnier told The Athletic. “She got a hold of my stick and dropped it down, and that was just kind of the green flag for me …. I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

The first legitimate fight in the #PWHL. 🥊 @PWHL_Boston’s Jill Saulnier & @PWHL_Ottawa’s Tereza Vanišová square off. #PWHL @jill_saulnier @VanisovaTereza pic.twitter.com/L6fr5biVmv
— Melissa Burgess (@_MelissaBurgess) February 21, 2025

The Feb. 20 fight during a game between the Boston Fleet and Ottawa Charge was the first-ever in the PWHL and one of the league’s most viral moments.

Fights aren’t entirely new to women’s hockey. There was a line brawl between Canada and the United States at a pre-tournament game ahead of the 2014 Olympics, and another in the now-defunct National Women’s Hockey League in 2016.

There are usually big hits and scrums after whistles at the professional and international level. But these moments — with fists flying — have been few and far between.

For the players involved in the PWHL’s first fight, it was just a natural part of the women’s game and a product of the increased physicality allowed in the league.

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“It’s a heated game, it’s a physical game, and we’re all very competitive,” said Saulnier, now a forward for Boston after a January trade from the New York Sirens. “It’s just the way that the chips kind of fell in the corner.”

The build-up to the fight included a hit and at least two extra crosschecks by Saulnier against Vanišová, one of Ottawa’s top scoring forwards. When Vanišová got up, she threw Saulnier’s stick to the ground.

“I felt like the warranted next move was a hard right,” Saulnier said. “In the moment, it was physical and that fight had to happen. It was right there and it was a message from each side.”

Neither player dropped their gloves, as is customary in men’s hockey, given women’s players wear full cages that protect their face — not visors like most NHLers wear, which leave most of their face exposed. In both leagues, players are not allowed to remove their helmets to fight.

“You’d just look silly to fully drop the gloves,” Saulnier said, given they’d be punching a cage with their bare hands.

The nearly 6,000 fans at TD Place Arena in Ottawa were on their feet. So were the players on each bench. Five minutes after the fight, Ottawa defender Ronja Savolainen scored to make the game 2-1 late in the third period. When Vanišová got out of the penalty box, she scored with only three seconds left in the game to send it to overtime and register the first unofficial “Gordie Howe hat trick” in the league’s history — when a player scores a goal, assists on a goal and fights in the same game.

“I thought it was awesome, it got the fans going,” Saulnier said. “I’m sure I’ll get a couple boos next time I go in there, but please know, it was all respectful and it was a lot of fun.”

Ottawa ultimately lost 3-2 in overtime and Saulnier and Vanišová shared a moment in the postgame handshake line to say, “Nice fight.”

“You see the intensity of the game and that’s the fun part of this league,” said Ottawa coach Carla MacLeod after the game. “Neither player backed down and I suspect there will be a little bit of buzz about it, which is never bad for the game either.”

The fight made worldwide news with headlines in TMZ and the Daily Mail, outlets that don’t typically cover women’s hockey. And it went viral on social media while 16 million people across North America were watching Canada and the United States in the 4 Nations Face-Off finale.

In the last week, fans have given Saulnier bracelets that spell out “Fight Club” in beads and T-shirts that say “Jill Saulnier Fight Club,” which one of her family members wore to Boston’s game against Montreal at the Bell Centre on Saturday.

“I think more people reached out than when we won a gold medal,” said Saulnier, a member of the 2022 Canadian Olympic team. “Obviously you shouldn’t fight every game, but I think it was actually good because it got more eyes on the league.”

The PWHL, which only officially started in January 2024, will take the exposure. The fight was also a nice bit of proof that the league is full of skilled players who can play with finesse and speed, but also embrace physicality. Still, fights aren’t something they want to be the norm.

The league’s rulebook clearly states that “fighting is not part of the PWHL’s game.” And before last month’s altercation, there wasn’t a ton of clarity on what penalties referees might impose other than that players who fight shall be penalized and may be ejected from the game.

Saulnier and Vanišová were only given roughing minors for their fight, which led to some confusion over the rules. Last week, the league clarified that a fight will now be penalized with a 5-minute major penalty and a game misconduct, with a possibility of further discipline following a review and taking into consideration repeat offenders.

According to Saulnier, Boston general manager Danielle Marmer calls it “the Jill Saulnier rule.”

The new rules should deter players from frequently fighting. In a short, 30-game season, players might not be willing to sit out an extra game just to give their team a boost of energy post-fight. The equipment barrier will also continue to be a natural deterrent for fighting in women’s hockey.

Beyond that, fighting is far from common at other levels of the women’s game. Even bodychecking has never been permitted in youth girls hockey, which means those skills are not typically taught. In boys hockey, bodychecking is introduced at the under-14 level and by the time a player gets to the professional level, fighting has very much been part of the game.

Saulnier doesn’t think her fight is going to open the floodgates to more moments like that in the future. But, she said, it certainly won’t be the last time we see a fight in women’s professional hockey.

“With the level of physicality, you’ll never not see it in the PWHL,” she said.

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Troy Parla / Getty Images)

Related Topics:Featured NHL Sports Business women's hockey

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Culture

6 Myths That Endure

Published

45 minutes ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room

Literature

The Myth of Meeting Oneself

“This is evident in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ (circa 30-19 B.C.) when Aeneas witnesses his own heroic actions depicted in murals of the Trojan War in Juno’s temple, and again in Miguel de Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’ (1605-15) when Quixote enters a printer’s shop and finds a book that has been published with fake details about his quest even as he’s living it,” says Ben Okri, 67, the author of “The Famished Road” (1991) and “Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted” (2025). “In both stories, individuals throw themselves into the world and think they encounter objects, personae, obstacles and antagonists, but what they actually encounter is themselves. In our time, where our actions meet us in the echo chamber of social media, the process is magnified and swifter. Now a deed doesn’t even have to take place for it to enter the realm of reality.”

The Myth of Utopia

“I’ve always had trouble with the idea of utopia, feeling it derives its energy more from what it wishes to dismantle than what it wishes to enact,” says the T writer at large Aatish Taseer, 45, the author of “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands” (2009). “Ram Rajya, or the mythical rule of the hero Ram in the Hindu epic ‘Ramayana’ (seventh century B.C.-third century A.D.), like all visions of perfection, contains a built-in violence.”

The Myth of Invisibility

“Invisibility bears power and powerlessness at the same time,” says Okri. “In ancient cultures, it was a gift of the gods. Jesus, for example, walks unrecognized among his disciples, and in Greek myths, Scandinavian legends and ancient African tales, heroes are gifted invisibility in the form of cloaks, sandals or spells. Modern works like the two ‘Invisible Man’ novels, by H.G. Wells (1897) and Ralph Ellison (1952), and the ‘Harry Potter’ novels (1997-2007) by J.K. Rowling reach back to those ideas. But today, people talk about visibility as the highest form of social agency, while invisibility can render a whole class, race, caste or gender unseen.”

The Myth of Steadiness vs. Speed

Charles Henry Bennett’s illustration “The Hare and the Tortoise” (1857). Alamy

“‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ one of Aesop’s fables (sixth century B.C.), doesn’t necessarily strike a younger person as promising — possibly it has a whiff of morality in it,” says Yiyun Li, 53, the author of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” (2005) and “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life” (2017). “But the longer I live and work, the more I understand that it’s the tortoiseness in a person that carries one along, not the swiftness of the mind and body of the hare.”

The Myth of Magic

William Etty’s “The Sirens and Ulysses” (1837). Bridgeman Images

“Ancient magical tales like Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (late eighth to early seventh century B.C.) were allegories of transformation, of secret teachings,” says Okri, “whereas modern forms of magic are narrative devices and tropes of storytelling that continue the child’s wonder of life. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1925), Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (1967) and, again, the ‘Harry Potter’ books. The intuition of magic persists even in these atheistic and science-infested times, where nothing is to be believed if it can’t be subjected to analysis. This is perhaps because the ultimate magic confronts us every day in the mystery of consciousness. That we can see anything is magical; that we experience love is magical; and perhaps the most magical thing of all is the imagination’s unending power to alter the contents and coordinates of reality. It hides tenaciously in the act of reading, which is the most generative act of magic.”

The Myth of the Immortal Soul

“ ‘The soul is birthless and eternal, imperishable and timeless and is not destroyed when the body is destroyed,’ says Krishna in the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ (second century-first century B.C.). This belief in the immortality of the soul — what used to be called Pythagoreanism in ancient Greece — is still the most pervasive myth in India,” says Taseer, “and has more influence over behavior and how one lives one’s life than any other.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

Sign Up for the Book Review’s 2026 Challenge

Published

4 days ago

April 14, 2026

Press Room

Hello book lovers!

What better way to close out National Poetry month than by memorizing a poem?

Next week, from April 20-24, the Book Review will unveil our second poetry challenge. Like last year’s, it will bring you five days of games, videos and writing about one wonderful poem.

Make sure you’re among the first to see each new installment by signing up for the Book Review newsletter. After the challenge is over, you will continue to receive the newsletter, which features book recommendations, publishing news and more. You’ll also receive notifications when we publish our weekly book recommendation column. You can find out which newsletters you are signed up for here.

Culture

Can You Match This Sharp Line to Its Book?

Published

4 days ago

April 13, 2026

Press Room

Can You Match This Sharp Line to Its Book?

Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of memorable lines. This week’s installment celebrates sharp dialogue and observations from 20th-century fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.