With the addition of Seattle and Vancouver to the Professional Women’s Hockey League, each of the rosters of the original six clubs have sustained significant losses. Throughout the summer, PWHL writer Rob Del Mundo will summarize the impact to each team. Today we look at the New York Sirens.
The New York Sirens are doubling down – literally – on their young forwards.
After losing potent forwards Alex Carpenter and Jessie Eldrige to PWHL Seattle, via free agency and the expansion draft respectively, general manager Pascal Daoust turned to the draft day floor to make his biggest splashes.
With the first overall pick, the Sirens drafted Czechian phenom Kristyna Kaltounkova out of Colgate University. The hard-shooting 5-foot-9 forward is coming off a season during which she tallied an astonishing 26 goals and 48 points in just 37 games. At the Women’s World Hockey Championship last April, she was named to the All-Star Team while playing in front of her appreciative fans on home soil.
Daoust pulled off a blockbuster trade sending star defender Ella Shelton to Toronto, receiving the Sceptres’ first and fourth round picks in return. With highly-touted defender Haley Winn selected by Boston at #2, New York used their newly-acquired third overall pick to take Casey O’Brien, winner of the Patty Kazmaier Award as the top player in women’s college hockey.
O’Brien, 23, had a season for the ages, compiling 88 points in 41 games at the University of Wisconsin. She also claimed honours as WCHA Player of the Year and Forward of the Year while leading the Badgers to a national championship title.
Indeed the Sirens are rolling the dice on inserting two young forwards Kaltounkova and O’Brien to compensate for the losses of Carpenter and Eldridge.
The gamble comes at a cost on the back-end. Having already protected anchor Micah Zandee-Hart and Maja Nylen Persson on the blue line, Shelton – the team’s third defensive protectee – was an expensive price that Daoust was willing to pay to obtain O’Brien at the draft. New York will certainly miss the offensive output from Shelton, who led all PWHL defenders last season with eight goals in 24 games.
Even more concerning for second year coach Greg Fargo and his squad is the instability between the pipes. Mainstay Corinne Schroeder signed with Seattle during the free agency window, joining her teammate Alex Carpenter. That leaves Kayle Osborne as the main woman to backstop the club. While Osborne’s statistics were comparable to her predecessor’s in 2024-25, she is yet unproven as she enters her second season, having backed up Schroeder for all of ten games last year.
With Abbey Levy scooped up by Boston as a free agent, the Sirens’ pre-season roster on the PWHL website does not list a backup goaltender, at the time of this writing.
New York boasts a trio of young, explosive forwards in draft picks Kaltounkova and O’Brien joining Rookie of the Year winner and Forward of the Year nominee Sarah Fillier. The team is also banking on Kristin O’Neill having a bounce-back season, after acquiring the forward on a draft day trade from Montreal for Abbey Roque.
The pressure continues to mount as the Sirens strive to remove the distinction of being the only one of the original six PWHL teams to never have made the playoffs. A post-season berth will be the standard by which to measure Daoust’s gamble.
