Toronto’s Professional Women’s Hockey League team skated to victory Wednesday night, kicking off the league’s first playoff match with a 4-0 win over visiting Minnesota.
Natalie Spooner — the league’s leading regular season goalscorer with 20 goals in 24 games — opened things up with the first playoff goal in PWSHL history at 9:47 of the first period, later notching an assist in front of Coca-Cola Coliseum’s 8,473 fans. Captain Blayre Turnbull followed up Spooner’s efforts with two goals of her own, securing the game’s final point with just 38 seconds remaining in the third quarter.
In the defensive end, goalie Kristen Campbell put a stop to all 26 shots fired her way. With game one behind them, Toronto has pulled ahead of Minnesota 1-0 in the best-of-five series.
Good soup. 🍲
Kristen Campbell locks in the first-ever PWHL Playoff shutout! pic.twitter.com/J0Ve9MjHpw
— PWHL (@thepwhlofficial) May 9, 2024
“It’s what I believe I expect and I think what the group expects as well,” head coach Troy Ryan said in postgame remarks. “Being everything we thought it would be, I think the atmosphere was incredible. I think our performance was pretty good and I think it’s a great stepping-stone for us to continue to build on for this series and hopefully moving forward.
For Turnbull, the win came as a result of weeks of regular season preparation, adding that the team was “proud” of its execution throughout their first playoff game.
“The whole season we’ve been building and building waiting to get into playoffs and trying to find our game every week and get better so that when players arrived, we are ready to go,” Turnbull said. “I think there’s still a few areas that we can keep improving on, but overall, we’re pretty happy with where we’re at, so we’re excited to get back on the ice for game two.”
The postseason outing continues a record-breaking regular season for the young league. In total, the PWHL set six attendance records for women’s hockey this year, with nearly 400,000 fans showing up to watch the inaugural teams take the ice over the 72-game season.
Toronto will face Minnesota at home once more in Game 2 of the series on Friday, before the teams move to Minnesota for Monday’s Game 3.