The Seattle Torrent had a rough go of things in their inaugural season as a franchise. Despite boasting a roster made up of incredibly talented individual athletes, they ended the 2025–26 season with a record of 8–1–5–16. This gave them a points percentage of just .344—worst in league history. The number tops 2024’s PWHL New York, which had a 5–4–3–12 record in 24 games for a .361 points percentage.

Several reasons behind this struggle have been discussed in depth.

The poor performance of the Torrent in 2025–26 warranted major adjustments both on and off the ice. Luckily, the front office has been extremely willing to adapt to the circumstances. Here’s what they’ve been up to since their final puck drop, and what season two could look like.

Coaching Changes

On May 22, just two days after the Montreal Victoire hoisted the Walter Cup, the Seattle Torrent opened the floodgates for PWHL offseason news by announcing they were parting ways with head coach Steve O’Rourke.

On June 11, they announced the appointment of Christine Bumstead to fill the vacancy. Bumstead spent the Torrent’s inaugural season behind their bench as an assistant coach. Before the PWHL, she was an assistant coach for the University of Saskatchewan women’s team and a player development coach for the Saskatoon Blades of the WHL, among other positions.

“Her unique background in education and diverse coaching resume, combined with a strong natural ability to build trust and meaningful connections, make her well-suited to lead our team,” Torrent general manager Megan Turner remarked in a press release about the hiring.

More recently, on July 21, the Torrent announced the hiring of Stefanie McKeough, who spent the past three seasons as an assistant coach for the Boston Fleet, to fill their assistant coach vacancy left by Bumstead’s promotion.

Coaching changes will not be the only thing necessary to turn around the ship for the Seattle Torrent, but the changes that they have made are telling. They signal that the organization is prioritizing individuals who already have proven familiarity with the PWHL and women’s hockey as a whole. It’s a complete turnaround from former head coach O’Rourke, who had no experience coaching women’s hockey prior to joining the Torrent.

The Expansion Process

Seattle’s revamped team behind the bench will be working with a very different roster next season. The squad had a particularly rough month or so during roster-building phases for the PWHL’s newest teams, losing 10 players to them, the most of any existing team.

This list of players includes forwards Hilary Knight and Hannah Bilka going to Detroit alongside defender Cayla Barnes, goaltender Corinne Schroeder signing in San Jose, and four players signing in Vegas, among others.

Why Expansion Isn’t Bad for Seattle

It’s hard to blame anyone for giving into doom and gloom about the situation, but at the same time, this could be great for Seattle. If a roster isn’t working and you have the opportunity to interchange half of its parts, why wouldn’t you do it?

There’s also the fact that this major shakeup had less impact offensively than one might think.

Take a look at this data, visualised by 365HockeyGirl.

Graph was published on July 13 and may not reflect all up-to-date signings

Rather than displaying teams by how many players they’ve lost, this graph shows how many goals each team scored in the 2025–26 season, Negative numbers indicate the goal total of all of the players a given team lost in expansion. Positive numbers, by contrast, show the amount of goals scored by players still signed on a team’s roster.

The graph is sorted by how many goals each team lost. It shows that Seattle, despite losing more players than any other team in expansion and free agency combined, lost the fewest goals scored among teams that lost goal scorers with 16.

While not perfect because it doesn’t account for assists, this suggests that most players Seattle lost didn’t contribute much offensively. It also shows that Seattle still has more goals scored left from its currently signed players than New York, Ottawa, and Toronto.

To sum all of that up, Seattle still has a lot of talent to build off of.

The Leftover Core

Despite the caliber of players Seattle lost in expansion, here’s some notable names they retained for season two.

Alex Carpenter

The presumed captain of the Torrent following the departure of Hilary Knight, the impact, leadership, and stability Carpenter can provide her otherwise-altered team can’t be overstated.

Despite never playing on a team ranked above last in the PWHL, she’s had 20 point campaigns every season in the league. In 2025–26, she led the Torrent in goals with 12, five more than the next closest player and co-led them in points with 20.

Julia Gosling/Danielle Serdachny

Both Julia Gosling and Danielle Serdachny had breakout campaigns in Seattle after less-impactful rookie seasons elsewhere. Their continued success on the west coast would be massive for the Torrent.

Gosling had six goals and 14 assists for 20 points in 2025–26, doubling her point total from her rookie year in Toronto (4 goals and six assists, 10 total points) and co-leading the Torrent in points alongside Alex Carpenter.

Serdachny was a first-round pick for the Ottawa Charge in 2025, taken at second overall. She had a slow start in the pros, scoring just two goals and six assists for the Charge. In Seattle, she began to show flashes of why she was drafted so high, scoring seven goals and nine assists for 16 points. This placed her second on the Torrent in goals scored and third in points.

Hannah Murphy

Even though the Torrent lost Corinne Schroeder to San Jose, they still have a solid situation at the goalie position. Schroeder and rookie goalie Hannah Murphy played in a tandem for much of 2025–26, making Murphy well prepared for starting duties.

Murphy appeared in 12 games last season, posting a record of 4–8, with all final scores decided in regulation time. She had a GAA of 2.87 and a save percentage of .908.

This was enough to see her named to the 2026 All-Rookie Team. Following the honour, the Torrent elected to protect her from expansion over Schroeder, indicating they have a lot of confidence in the fact that she hasn’t hit her ceiling at the pro level.

The Draft

The Torrent took a balanced approach to the 2026 draft. They selected three forwards (Round 1, Round 3, and Round 4), two defenders (Round two and Round 5), and one goalie (Round 6).

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Their biggest pick was undoubtedly Abbey Murphy at second overall. It was also their most controversial. While Murphy is certainly deserving of such a high pick in terms of caliber of play, her reputation precedes her in the eyes of many PWHL fans.

Controversies and penalty minutes aside, selecting a forward in the first round might have been divisive either way. Looking at Seattle’s stats from last season, they allowed 92 goals in their inaugural campaign. That’s the most of any team in the PWHL. Especially with Cayla Barnes leaving, the Torrent might have been better off drafting Laila Edwards to solidify the blueline while adding a scoring touch.

The front office was certainly aware during the draft that they needed a little bit of everything, so the decision to bypass Edwards has been confusing for many.

It might simply come down to selecting what they believed to be the best player available. Edwards officially declaring as a defender and announcing her intent to play on the backend in the pros despite not doing so in the NCAA probably didn’t help her chances against Murphy, despite her high performance there for the US National Team.

You have to admit, though, that the idea of Alex Carpenter and Abbey Murphy on a power play unit together is the stuff of dreams, especially given that the Torrent power play was one of the team’s best features in its first season.

How All the Pieces Fit

As always, here’s up-to-date roster formations from The Hockey News.

Left Wing	Center	Right Wing
Julia Gosling	Alex Carpenter	Abbey Murphy
Emma Nuutinen	Mikyla Grant-Mentis	Daniel Serdachny
Theresa Schafzl	Emerson Jarvis	Gabrielle David
Lexie Adzjia	Lily Delianedis	Neena Brick
Grace Eliott

Potential Flaws of the Roster

As alluded to before, a problem that has always existed for the Torrent continues to linger, that being a lack of defence.

They have not made significant upgrades on the blueline despite it being a weak point for their previous iteration. If anything, perhaps Seattle’s defence took a step back with the loss of Cayla Barnes. Seattle’s incoming rookies on D are not anticipated to be at her level on the first pairing, either, so who knows how effective it’ll actually be.

The issue of depth may also still plague them. The projected first line of Gosling, Carpenter, and Murphy is exciting, but beyond that there’s a couple of question marks on the second and third lines.

Depth Players to Note

Emma Nuutinen

Emma Nuutinen will be an interesting player to watch. Signed as an undrafted free agent on June 21, she’s a skilled Finnish forward who has had a lot of success in the Auroraliga, scoring over 60 points in each of the last three seasons with Kiekko-Espoo. As we know, though, success in Europe doesn’t always translate to North America.

Nuutinen spent the 2022–23 season with the Buffalo Beauts of the PHF, where she scored four goals and six assists for 10 points in 24 games, which bodes decently for her success in the PWHL. As a projected part of the Torrent’s top 6, she’ll have to elevate her game even further from there.

Grant-Mentis and Schafzl

There’s also a couple of returning players on the Torrent who could elevate their games and help eliminate any doubt about the team’s depth. Namely, Mikyla Grant-Mentis and Theresa Schafzl.

In the PWHL, Grant-Mentis has never exactly lived up to the caliber she was at in the NWHL/PHF.

In the COVID-shortened 2020–21 season with the Toronto Six, she won the MVP and Newcomer of the Year awards, becoming the only player in PHF history to win both awards. The following year, she scored 30 points in just 19 games. After signing with the Buffalo Beauts in the season before the PWHL folded, she recorded 21 points in 24 games.

Despite this, Grant-Mentis has a career high of only eight points in a single season in the PWHL, a benchmark set in 2024–25. Last season, she scored three goals and three assists.

Finally, Teresa Schafzl is another player to watch. Schafzl, a projected third line winger for 2026–27, began to put herself on the map towards the end of last season, following a trade from the Boston Fleet to Seattle that took place on March 16. In 69 career games for Boston across two and a half seasons ahead of the move, Schafzl recorded 17 points—8 goals and nine assists. By contrast, in just 11 games with Seattle, she scored two goals and seven assists for nine total points.

It seems Schafzl has found her groove in Seattle’s system. With the elevation of Christine Bumstead rather than a new hire for head coach, there’s a lot of reason to anticipate that trend continues.

If all three of these players—or, honestly, any combination of them—are able to break out fully, the conversation around the Torrent’s depth will look very different.

Is a Cinderella Story in the Making?

All of this brings us back to the titular question: Is all of this change enough to course correct the Torrent into a championship winning franchise, or are they headed for another year at the bottom?

I think the real answer is somewhere in between. If the team can avoid the injury bug that bit them last season, they should at least be decently competitive.

The front office in Seattle has revamped the team enough that it’s tough to imagine they suffer all of the same struggles as last season. At the same time, as more teams enter the league, competition is only going to get stiffer, and the half-new Torrent roster will have an adjustment period that other existing teams won’t be feeling as harshly. On paper, once they adjust, the Torrent have more scoring capabilities than several other teams in the PWHL. However, hockey isn’t played on paper, and their D core is no less questionable than it was a year ago, so anything can happen.

Final Thoughts

My ultimate prediction for the Torrent is that if the playoff format expands because of the number of teams that have been added to the league, they’ve done enough to reinvent the squad that they should be in serious contention for one of those playoff spots. If it still comes down to four teams, I’m not sold on their defence or even their goaltending in comparison to the top teams in the league.

Either way, being realistic, I don’t think Seattleites will be planning for a Walter Cup parade anytime soon.

Still, going from what was arguably the worst team in league history to a playoff spot in the span of just one season would be a Cinderella story in its own right. (PWHL New York couldn’t do it in a smaller version of the league, after all.) Torrent fans shouldn’t take that possibility for granted.

Remember that things are only looking up in the Emerald City, regardless of how long it takes to get to the final destination. For a team like the Torrent, any progress is good progress, and they are certainly poised to make a leap.