The longest anyone has led a PWHL race without winning it: the Boston Fleet ended 49 of the 2025-26 PWHL race's 77 playing days in first place, 64% of them, and finished behind the Montréal Victoire. The longest unbroken spell of that lead ran 32 days. At the other end of the same race, the Montréal Victoire won it having led on 24 of those 77, never more than 13 in a row. Both lists below rank by the share of a race's playing days a team spent in first place. How that is counted is spelled out under the lists.
Companion pages: Closest PWHL races and Biggest PWHL comebacks and collapses.
Everything on this page comes from the same season files the charts draw, with standings read as each day ended. All 3 charted PWHL races from 3 finished seasons enter: every race from 2024 to 2025-26. Wild card races are not ranked; their story is the playoff cutoff, not first place. A team's time in first place is counted once per season, at its longest, whichever of its charted races it came in.
Longest leads lost is the club that ended the most of a race's playing days in first place and did not finish first. Any club in the race qualifies, not the runner-up alone, because a club can lead for four months and finish fifth.
Winners who led least is the same count for the club that did win, ranked from the fewest days up. Each row closes on the day that winner took first place for good, which the comebacks page ranks on.
Only days this race's teams played are counted, the same rule the closest races page counts closeness over. A strike or a pause freezes the standings, and a leader sitting out an idle stretch would collect time on top for nothing.
The ranking is by share rather than by the raw count, because a league's seasons are not all the same length and a short one would otherwise win by being short. Seasons cut short by a strike or a stoppage are ranked on what was played, which is the same rule and the reason for it. The count and the total are printed beside the share, so the order can be checked; where two rows print the same whole percent, the unrounded share put them in that order.
A day two clubs end level at the top is a day in first place for both of them, which is what holding first place means in English. So the two counts of one race can add up to more than the race's playing days. Races whose top two the standings cannot separate appear on neither list: with no winner, the data can name neither the club that lost a lead nor the club that kept one.
A lead measured in days and a lead measured in points are different questions, and the two lists often disagree about which season was the bigger collapse; the comebacks page ranks the same blown leads by size. Only finished seasons are ranked; every irregularity in the record is listed in the data notes.