PWHL Detroit adds a Hall of Famer and a Cup winner to the bench

The W read up front: this is the best hire Detroit's front office has made since Manon Rhéaume took the GM chair, and it's not close.

Danielle Goyette is joining PWHL Detroit as an assistant coach, and Jimmy Howard is coming in as the team's goaltending coach — the club's second and third additions to a bench that already has Molly Engstrom, who signed on back in June.

Goyette's resume is the kind that makes a locker room sit up straight. Three Olympic medals. Nine world championship medals. 172 games for Canada's national team, plus a Hockey Hall of Fame plaque from 2017 (she's in the IIHF Hall of Fame too).

She's coached before — a national title at Calgary, two more medals running Canada's program through 2014 — and she spent the last several seasons developing players inside the Maple Leafs organization. That's a coach who has won at the top level and taught players how to get there.

Howard's the local connection. Fourteen years in net for the Red Wings. A Cup in 2008. 246 wins, three All-Star trips, a U.S. Olympic roster spot in 2014. He's been coaching at Little Caesars since he hung up the pads in 2021. This isn't a big name attached to a title he'll never work. He's already doing the job.

Rhéaume called the hires exactly what they are: experience that's won everywhere, stacked onto a bench that needed some. Goyette said she sees an exciting opportunity to build something special in Detroit; Howard called the goaltending job an incredible honor.

The read: Detroit's problem last season wasn't talent. It was that Sciba's staff had one voice with a real track record and everybody else still learning the job. That's fixed now.

A goaltending-specific coach matters more in this league than people give it credit for. The neutral zone is tighter than it used to be, and the shot volume is real. A guy who stopped 246 NHL games knows exactly what that workload does to a goalie's game over a season.

Goyette gives the room a coach players already trust, because they've watched her win with a stick in her hand, not just a whistle around her neck.

Detroit's training camp opens next month. Whether this staff turns a talented, uneven team into a contender is the story of the season. But they upgraded the room today, and that part was easy.