PWHL New York's Carpenter hoping to build team success off unusual career path

She won the first face-off. She authored the first assist. And then, for the emphatic cherry on top, Alex Carpenter lasered a glove-side wrist shot that rung off the cross bar and in, sealing New York’s victory over Toronto in the first game in PWHL history.

After her team’s 4-0 decisive win on the first day of 2024, Carpenter stood in front of a purple PWHL backdrop wearing a black toque, a New York sweatshirt, dark pants and black sneakers. She was expressionless as she described her bar-down goal that minutes earlier sucked the air out of Toronto’s home rink.

“Nothing crazy,” Carpenter said, like it was a casual walk in the park. “Just shooting the puck.”

Toronto defender Renata Fast had a good look at that goal, and while she didn’t like it one bit, it came as no surprise to the veteran Team Canada blueliner.

“She’s probably the quietest, best player in the world,” said Fast, who played alongside Carpenter last season in the PWHPA’s Toronto chapter. “Like, she’s not talked about enough. She’s so, so good.”

Toronto forward Jesse Compher has played on Team USA with Carpenter on and off since 2019.

“I don’t think her name is said as much as it should be. She’s one of the best in the world and she should have that kind of respect all season long,” Compher said. “People should know they’re playing against Alex Carpenter, and what she can do.”

Certainly the 29-year-old from Massachusetts gave a sense of what she can do in her first 60 minutes of PWHL action, putting up two points, which ties Carpenter for the league lead in the very early goings of the season. And on Friday, she and New York will be looking to become the first team to earn a win on home ice as they host a rematch against Toronto at Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport, Conn., a 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT puck drop on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+. (So far Toronto, Ottawa and Boston have all hosted and lost.)

By now, all of six teams have hit the ice in this inaugural season. The PWHL is full of Patty Kazmaier Award winners, like Carpenter. Full of world champions, like Carpenter. Full of Olympic medallists, like Carpenter. But you won’t find a single player who took a road here quite like she did.

“It’s very unique,” Carpenter said of her pro career. “Very different from what most other players have done.”

Since 2016, Carpenter’s career has taken her all over the hockey world in the NWHL, CWHL, ZhHL, PWHPA, and now PWHL. She has lived in the U.S., China, Russia and Canada.

One year after she was selected first overall ahead of the NWHL’s 2016-17 season, Carpenter elected to enter the 2017 CWHL draft to take up a unique opportunity: The league was expanding to include two franchises in China, to help the country prepare for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Import players would be paid a salary to not only play for the team, but to help grow hockey and to assist their Chinese teammates on the ice, and the team would be based in Shenzhen, in the south of China.

“My dad actually was coaching for the men’s team out there [in China] and he put the idea in my head that it would be a really neat experience,” Carpenter said.

A surprise final cut from Team USA’s 2018 Olympic squad after helping her nation win silver four years earlier, Carpenter moved to Shenzhen in January 2018 to play out the rest of the season for the CWHL’s Kunlun Red Star.

She’d ride her electric scooter to the rink mid-morning, where the team would practice for about two hours followed by an off-ice workout in the same facility.

“We’d go back home for lunch in our building, and then we’d have the afternoon free,” Carpenter said. That was life, with games on weekends.

“When I was living in China, that was really the first time I felt that I was a professional athlete,” she said. “You had a bonus structure in your contract, you had incentives. It felt like every game mattered, and we were playing for something.”

After the CWHL’s collapse in 2019, Carpenter joined the other stars of the game in the PWHPA in boycotting the existing North American-based pro women’s league (then called the NWHL) but was still able to play overseas. She signed for another season with the China-based KRS Vanke Rays, who’d play the 2018-19 season in the Russian-based Zhenskaya Hockey League (ZhHL) since the CWHL was no more. That’s what led Carpenter to eventually call Russia home, for a time.

“We were travelling [back and forth] from China to Russia, playing in the Russian league, and then COVID hit,” she said. “So, we moved to St. Petersburg, basically. We were living out of a hotel out there for quite a while.”

Vanke made the ZhHL final, and it was a best-of-five against their rival team, Agidel Ufa.

“We didn’t even get a home rink, so we had our home rink in their rink in their city,” Carpenter explained. “They put all our advertising up and made us a home locker room.”

Despite never really being at home, the Rays swept the series and won the title, making history in the process as the first Chinese team to win a major hockey championship.

“It was so special to be able to win with them; so many of the Chinese players were just so excited. You’d come back to the bench after a big play and they’d be just firing you up. Everybody was on board with everything we were doing and it was so special to be able to share that with them,” Carpenter said.

There was a sense of urgency beyond just competing to win that final in three straight games: Had they not, Carpenter and other imports would’ve risked being stuck in Russia because the U.S. was about to shut down its borders in an effort to minimize COVID transmission.

“If we had to play another game, we would’ve stayed another day, and the U.S. had shut down travel that next day. Everybody was scrambling to get on earlier flights. We were lucky we got to leave,” she said with a laugh. “That was just a crazy season.”

Carpenter made it back to Boston, as not only the league champion, but also the ZhHL’s leading scorer, with 53 points in 28 games.

She was able to return to China the next season and was named Rays captain for 2020-21, and once again led the league in scoring and paced her team to the final — a rematch against Agidel Ufa. And then, COVID threw them through another loop.

“They [Agidel Ufa] had COVID issues, so we didn’t play the final — we all went home,” Carpenter said, noting that final was later rescheduled for August 2021. “And then they brought back people to play in August, but a lot of us had training camps and the world championships [held in late August 2021], so we couldn’t go. So, they brought in a new team to play.”

She’s not making this stuff up. Agidel Ufa captured the championship that year.

Carpenter planned to return to the ZhHL for the 2021-22 season, but the political climate in Russia and the invasion of Ukraine changed her mind.

“Morally, I didn’t really feel comfortable — that was just something I didn’t want to take a chance on,” she said. “I would’ve loved to go back, had all that not happened. But with everything going on, I didn’t feel I could.”

Instead, Carpenter opted to play last season with the PWHPA and moved to Toronto, since it’s home to her wife, Steph Klein, who’s an equipment manager with the AHL’s Marlies.

Then, in September, as the PWHL was getting underway for a 2024 start, each team got to sign three players ahead of the draft, and Carpenter fielded a lot of calls.

“We definitely considered Toronto as one of the options that would have worked out,” she said. “We obviously both have our careers to consider, and we’re used to the long distance. We’ve done it before. I think after talking to each other and weighing my options, we thought that New York would be the best fit for my career.”

Carpenter said her mind was made up after speaking to New York GM Pascal Daoust, who is big on team culture. In September, Carpenter signed a three-year deal there, and in December, she was named an alternate captain.

As Compher noticed when they first met five years ago, Carpenter isn’t the biggest voice in the room, but she still makes herself heard.

“She’s a little bit more on the quiet side, she keeps to herself," Compher said. "But when she’s on the ice, you can tell how much skill she has, how much love she has for the game. It’s awesome.”

What Fast noticed first when they became teammates was Carpenter’s speed.

“I don’t know if people would usually identify her as a fast player, but she could probably push to be the fastest player on the ice,” said Fast. “Her speed is so deceiving, and her straight-away speed is phenomenal. I remember practicing against her last season and being, like, ‘Oh yeah, I have her.’ She’d be coming down the wall and then she takes two strides and she’d be past me and I’d be, like, ‘What?’ And it just kept happening.

“And you saw her shot against us [on Monday] — like, that release is incredible. But when I think about Carpenter, I think of how good of a playmaker she is. She sees the ice so well.”

And yet, as Fast points out, Carpenter “flies under the radar” when it comes to mentions of the best in the world. Both she and Compher wonder whether Carpenter being left off the gold medal 2018 American Olympic team is to blame for that. Or maybe it’s the fact that she starred overseas for nearly three seasons, and fans in North America didn’t get a chance to see her play regularly like they do now.

“She very much does it all,” Compher said. “She can win faceoffs, she can score really nice goals, make amazing passes, but she’s also someone who’s not afraid to get into the corners and win every battle. It’s nice to see her do absolutely everything on the ice.”

Except when you’re playing against her, that is, which Compher and Fast will be doing again on Friday.

After Carpenter helped New York hand that loss to Toronto at their home opener, she was all business about the task at hand that afternoon, even if it was a part of history.

“It’s definitely a special moment. I think for us, we were just focused on getting a win,” Carpenter said post-game. “This is now our job and we’re so lucky to be able to call this our job. And I think we really take it seriously that this is what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to win for our fans, for the city of New York.”

Shoot the puck. Win for the city. Carpenter makes it sound — and look — oh so easy.