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high level ice hockey leagues that stream free on youtube
wanted to compile a list into a post for people to reference.
PWHL - Professional Women's Hockey League, top pro women's league in USA/Canada, streams free everywhere outside Canada (sorry, Canada) (Proton VPN is a great free option), 12 teams, November - May, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
SDHL - Swedish Women's Hockey League, top pro women's league, lotta players going back and forth between here and the PWHL, 10 teams, September - March, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
EWHL/AWHL* - European Women's Hockey League & Austrian Women's Hockey League, this is sorta two leagues intertwined. i need to research more to understand, but they both stream on this channel, don't ask me how many teams, MANY countries which is pretty cool,September - March, website (shared) - eliteprospects (EWHL / AWHL) - wikipedia (shared)
*for some reason it's not letting me link the channel, but going on youtube and searching either ewhl or awhl will get you there
AWIHL - Australian Women's Ice Hockey League, top Australian women's league, 6 teams, November - March, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
NZWIHL - New Zealand Women's Ice Hockey League, top women's Aotearoa hockey league, 4 teams, May - August, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
NZIHL - New Zealand Men's Ice Hockey League, top men's Aotearoa hockey league, 5 teams, May - August, website - eliteprospects - wikipedia
Special Mention: the ЖХЛ/ZhHL, the Russian Women's Hockey League, used to stream free on youtube but hasn't the past couple years due to a youtube ban. You can still find their old game streams on the channel.
Note that some leagues are going to have streaming services outside youtube that they use, which may or may not be free and/or require a VPN, but in this post I wanted to focus on youtube since that's what most people are going to default to.
Also note that there are lots of other ways to watch hockey on youtube. There's country-specific youtube channels that stream multiple leagues and/or international matchups (Ukraine as an example), there are individual teams that host their own channels (multiple Federal Prospects Hockey League teams stream their own games), there's some random beer leagues that stream their own games (there's an Australian 4v4 league called the Kondos Ice Hockey League), FloHockey youtube channel has random free game streams from their collection of leagues, and lots of channels post whatever games from various leagues, including full NHL games. None of these are what I was focusing on in this post. Perhaps I can create a follow-up with further links to all of that, idk.
Let me know if there's any you've found that I can add here!
someone just getting into mens hockey: these grown men are my precious little princesses
someone who has been watching mens hockey for a while: the violent hypermasculine structure of the hockey machine weeds out the precious princesses. there are in fact no precious princesses at all to be found in the nhl. they cant survive it. all of these men are, in one way or another, evil
someone who has been watching mens hockey for too long: these grown men are my precious little princesses. and this one uses she/her pronouns
The fact that sports teams can be bought and sold from one city to another without the approval of city government despite cities, counties, and states spending hundreds of millions if not billions of tax dollars to construct arenas and stadiums for them is genuinely insane.
the games are real, the stakes are real, the players themselves are unknowable except for what they carefully want you to know. the narratives are real, but the league knows you care about them, so they amplify them. the graphics next to the player's heads to tell you this is how their season is going, the camera lingering on them as they lean down to tie their shoes or their skates, looking solemn, the commentators tell you this is important, the marketing tells you this is important, in case you didnt know. the stories are already there but theyre also well-crafted. you care about these players. you care about how they perform. not just because you want to see your team win but because you want to see the conclusion of the narrative being built around them.
not everyone is doing sports rpf the way you might be familiar with it in fandom spaces, but sports is always, on some level, rpf. the people are real, but the reason you care about them is because a story is being told about them, through numbers, satistics, win/loss ratios, championships. there is an interest in amplifying the drama and centering the narrative so you care more about what you're seeing while watching the game. and is that not simply rpf...........
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