How to Build a Championship PWHL Roster Around the League’s Most Dominant Offence
What Is a Stack and Why Should You Care?
The stack strategy is one of the most effective and underutilized approaches in fantasy hockey — at any level, in any format. The premise is straightforward: identify a team with a high-powered, interconnected offence, and build as much of your roster around their top producers as possible. When the engine runs, it runs for everyone. When Kelly Pannek sets up Taylor Heise, who finds Grace Zumwinkle on the back door, three players in your lineup benefit from the same play. That is the compounding effect that stacking is designed to exploit.
The risk is equally real. A team-wide offensive slump becomes a lineup-wide slump. A cold week for the Minnesota Frost is a cold week for your fantasy team. This is a high-conviction strategy that rewards research, commitment, and the willingness to build a roster around a single offensive identity.
In the PWHL, that identity belongs to Minnesota — and it has for every single season this league has existed.
Why Minnesota?
Because no team in the PWHL has ever done what the Minnesota Frost do offensively, and they have been doing it since day one.
Minnesota led the PWHL in scoring for the second consecutive season in 2025-26, recording a franchise-record 91 goals in 30 games. The second-place team, the Montréal Victoire, scored 78. That is a 13-goal gap, a number that reflects not just the depth of the Frost’s offensive talent but the efficiency and connectivity of a system that generates scoring from every line, every situation, and virtually every player on the roster. Of the league’s top ten scorers in 2025-26, five played for Minnesota. Five. That is not a coincidence. That is a culture, a system, and a roster built to produce in volume.
This is a franchise that has reached the playoffs in each of the PWHL’s three seasons, won back-to-back Walter Cup championships, and has never once finished outside the top three in league scoring. Their offensive identity is not a single-season phenomenon, it is the defining characteristic of the entire franchise. And heading into 2026-27, despite losing pieces to the expansion draft, the core that drives that production remains intact.
That is precisely why the Minnesota Frost stack belongs in your fantasy lineup.
The Players: Who to Target and Why
Kelly Pannek — F — 16 G, 17 A, 33 PTS
The Minnesota Frost stack begins here. Pannek broke the PWHL regular-season scoring record in 2025-26 with 33 points, led the league in both goals and total points, and was awarded the PWHL Forward of the Year, an honour that reflected a season that was remarkable in both its production and its consistency. She was nominated for league MVP alongside that recognition, and the dual nomination spoke to a player who was operating at a level that the rest of the league simply could not match.
What makes Pannek the foundation of this stack is not just her individual production but the way she generates it. She is the distributor and the finisher simultaneously — a forward whose hockey sense allows her to be a threat in every situation and whose chemistry with Heise gives Minnesota an elite two-player connection that opposing defenders cannot contain. She is the player through whom the entire Frost offence flows, and for fantasy purposes that means she is involved in more goals and more plays than her raw point total alone conveys.
She is the cornerstone of this stack. Build around her first.
Fantasy Outlook: 30 to 38 points. The most reliable PWHL fantasy forward in the game.
Taylor Heise — F — 13 G, 17 A, 30 PTS
The first overall pick in PWHL history has delivered on every expectation placed upon her, and her 2025-26 season was the strongest of her career. Heise finished with 13 goals and 17 assists for 30 points, was nominated for PWHL Forward of the Year, and played the kind of complete, engaged, two-way game that makes her an impact player in every situation Minnesota deploys her in.
What Heise brings to the stack that no other Minnesota player replicates is pure goal-scoring versatility. She scores in transition. She scores on the power play. She scores in close games and in games where the outcome is already decided, because her instincts in the offensive zone are simply too good to be turned off. Her chemistry with Pannek is the engine of Minnesota’s top line, and that connection has been producing fantasy-relevant results since the first game of the PWHL’s inaugural season.
In any PWHL fantasy format, Heise belongs in the top tier of forward selections. She is the second piece of this stack and an essential one.
Fantasy Outlook: 28 to 35 points. A perennial top-five forward in PWHL fantasy.
Grace Zumwinkle — F — 13 G, 10 A, 23 PTS
Grace Zumwinkle is the most consistent secondary scorer on this roster and one of the most underappreciated fantasy assets in the entire PWHL. In 2025-26 she posted 13 goals and 10 assists for 23 points in 29 games — a career-best campaign that confirmed what Minnesota’s coaching staff has long believed about her offensive ceiling. She was described by the PWHL itself as having “a career season” while pursuing her third consecutive Walter Cup, and the numbers supported that characterisation entirely.
Zumwinkle is a local product — she played her college hockey at the University of Minnesota — and she plays with the intensity of someone who understands exactly what this franchise means to the state and to the community that surrounds it. She is a natural finisher who benefits significantly from the playmaking environment that Pannek and Heise create around her. When the top line is clicking, Zumwinkle’s numbers follow.
At the draft cost she commands in most PWHL fantasy formats, she represents outstanding value as the third piece of a Minnesota stack.
Fantasy Outlook: 20 to 26 points. Elite value as a secondary scorer on the league’s best offence.
Kendall Cooper — D — 2 G, 17 A, 19 PTS
Kendall Cooper is the blue line anchor of this stack and one of the most important assets in PWHL fantasy for the 2026-27 season. The rookie defender led all first-year players in the league with 17 assists in the regular season, a number that placed her in elite company among defenders of any experience level, and her ability to quarterback Minnesota’s power play from the point makes her fantasy-relevant in every situation that matters most.
What separates Cooper from other rookie defenders in the stack conversation is her immediate impact. She was not eased into the lineup. She was not managed conservatively. From her first game, she was deployed in meaningful situations, handed power play responsibility, and asked to contribute to a Minnesota offence that expected production from its blue line. She delivered without hesitation.
The Minnesota Frost have historically led the PWHL in scoring by defenders, and Cooper is now the cornerstone of that tradition heading into her sophomore season with a full year of professional experience behind her. Her assist total will only grow as her confidence and chemistry with the forwards around her continues to develop.
Fantasy Outlook: 18 to 24 points. The most valuable PWHL fantasy rookie defender heading into 2026-27.
Sara Swiderski — D — 8 G, 19 A, 27 PTS (Ohio State, NCAA)
Sara Swiderski is the final piece of the Minnesota stack and the dynasty asset that gives this collection of players its long-term dimension. Drafted ninth overall by the Frost in the 2026 PWHL Draft out of Ohio State, Swiderski arrives in Minnesota with a profile that is tailor-made for the system she is entering.
In her senior season at Ohio State, she posted 8 goals and 19 assists for 27 points — numbers that placed her among the most productive defenders in the entire NCAA and signalled a player whose offensive instincts are well ahead of most at her draft position. Her plus-40 rating and 30 blocked shots reflect a two-way game that Minnesota GM Melissa Caruso specifically cited when making the selection, and Caruso drew an explicit parallel between Swiderski’s development trajectory and that of Kendall Cooper — last season’s standout rookie who led all first-year defenders with 17 assists.
The pairing of Cooper and Swiderski on the Minnesota blue line heading into 2026-27 is the most exciting defensive development in PWHL fantasy heading into next season. Two young, offensively gifted right-handed defenders, both under 25, both in a system that maximises defensive offensive production. The Minnesota tradition of leading the PWHL in scoring from the blue line is not just continuing. It is being reinforced with the most talented young defensive pairing in the league.
Swiderski will need time to adjust to the professional game. But she is in the best possible environment to do so, and her upside as a dynasty fantasy asset is significant.
Fantasy Outlook: 15 to 20 points in her rookie season with continued growth thereafter. A foundational dynasty defender.
The Stack in Practice: How to Execute
The Minnesota Frost stack is most effective when built with deliberate priority. Pannek is your first selection and should be treated as a first-round PWHL fantasy pick in any format. Heise follows in the first or early second round. Zumwinkle represents exceptional value in the middle rounds as a secondary scorer on the league’s most productive offence. Cooper belongs in the second round of any PWHL fantasy draft and should be valued as a forward given her points-per-game production from the blue line. Swiderski is the late-round dynasty selection that gives this stack its long-term ceiling.
In dynasty formats, the Minnesota stack is particularly compelling. The Frost have entered the playoffs in all three PWHL seasons. They have led the league in scoring in each of the last two. Their core is young, their system is proven, and their organisational commitment to offensive production from every position on the roster — including the blue line — makes them the most reliable stack target in the PWHL heading into 2026-27.
The Risk
The structural risk of any stack strategy is concentration. If Minnesota’s offence underperforms, the impact is felt across multiple roster spots simultaneously. The expansion draft removed meaningful pieces from the Frost’s depth, and the 2026-27 roster will look different enough from last season’s that some adjustment period is realistic.
The mitigation is straightforward: complement the stack with players from other teams who provide consistent floor production across different game states. Do not build your entire roster around Minnesota. Build the foundation of it around Minnesota, and fill the rest strategically.
That said, the Frost’s offensive core is intact. Pannek and Heise are back. Cooper is back. Zumwinkle is back. The system that produced 91 goals in 30 games last season — the most prolific single-season offensive performance in PWHL history — returns to the ice in November with its most important pieces in place. The risk of prolonged underperformance from this offence is lower than for any other team in the league.
The Minnesota Frost are the premier stack in PWHL fantasy hockey. They have earned that designation every season they have existed, and there is no credible evidence that 2026-27 will be any different.
Volume 2 of the PWHL Fantasy Stack Series is coming. Statistics sourced from the PWHL official records, Let’s Play Hockey, The Hockey News, Yahoo Sports, and the PWHL official website, July 2026.
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