The women's hockey exhibition between the NWHL Boston Pride and the CWHL Les Canadiennes at Gillette Stadium the day before the NHL Winter Classic marked the startup NWHL's "first large-scale collaboration with the NHL," according to Joe Delessio of SPORTS ON EARTH. What that relationship "will look like going forward, though, is a work in progress." NWHL Commissioner Dani Rylan said that working with the NHL in ways big and small "could go a long way toward raising the new league's profile." She said, "They have it all, so the more involved the NHL is, the better." Rylan called the relationship between the NHL and NWHL a "free-flowing and evolving relationship." Rylan: "In an ideal world, we'd love to be partnered with every NHL team in all of our markets." Delessio writes one idea that has been floated is "doubleheaders at NHL arenas with an NHL game and an NWHL game on the same bill." Those would "have to be worked out with individual NHL teams." Rylan said that discussions have "already been taking place." She said that NHL teams would be "open to it, schedule permitting, and the NHL says it supports the idea if its teams are interested." The NHL in '11 hired Val Ackerman to "study the state of women's hockey." NHL Senior VP/Business Affairs & Integrated Marketing Susan Cohig said that the league learned from that study that it "needs to be supporting the women's game at all levels." Cohig said league officials "don't really view our relationship with the NWHL in isolation from the rest of women's hockey." She said that the NHL "isn't considering operating a women's league right now" (SPORTSONEARTH.com, 1/11).
STAYING POSITIVE: The AP's Jimmy Golen noted Pride F Denna Laing has been "hospitalized with severe spinal damage since crashing into the boards" during the exhibition prior to the Winter Classic. But Laing said that the injury "didn't spoil 'the best day of my life.'" Laing in a Facebook post wrote, "We made history that day and I would never take those moments back." Laing's parents on Friday said that she has "limited movement of her arms and no feeling in her legs" (AP, 1/10).
