Detroit loses its best signing before it plays a game
Britta Curl-Salemme, third in PWHL scoring last season, will miss Detroit's first season after announcing she is expecting her first child.
Detroit built its first forward group around Britta Curl-Salemme, and it will play its first season without her. That's a real hockey loss for a team that hasn't dropped a puck yet. It's also the league's contract doing exactly what it was written to do.
Curl-Salemme announced Monday that she and her husband, Andrew, are expecting their first child, and she'll miss the 2026-27 season. Congratulations to them both.
What Detroit loses
The hockey side is plain. She finished third in the PWHL with 29 points last season, 11 goals and a league-record 18 assists in 30 games for Minnesota. She won the Walter Cup as a rookie in 2025. She had six points in seven games at the Olympics in February on the way to gold.
Detroit signed her to a three-year deal in June, during the expansion process. She was the kind of forward a new team signs so its power play has a plan on night one.
"We'll certainly miss Britta in the lineup when we hit the ice for our inaugural season," GM Manon Rheaume said.
What the league got right
Her pay is protected. Section 7.5 of the CBA covers players on standard contracts through pregnancy and maternity, so she keeps her salary while she's away.
That clause is why this reads as a roster story and not a career decision. A player shouldn't have to pick between a family and a paycheck, and in this league she doesn't.
By our count, she's the second player from the U.S. team that won gold in Milan to announce she'll miss this PWHL season. Minnesota captain Kendall Coyne Schofield announced her second child the week before. Neither is on the U.S. roster for the World Championship that opens Friday in Denmark.
What Detroit does now
Detroit opens Dec. 6 against Las Vegas at T-Mobile Arena, an all-expansion night, and plays its first home game Dec. 12 against the New York Sirens. Rheaume has a month to find those points somewhere else. Twenty-nine of them don't show up on the open market in November.
The likely answer is by committee, and committees rarely finish third in league scoring.
The W read: Detroit's ceiling dropped this week. The league's floor for how it treats its players didn't, and that's the better story.
