The Clutch Queen of Ottawa: How Rebecca Leslie is Helping Rewrite the PWHL Record Books

For the Ottawa Charge, clutch has a name. Rebecca Leslie. And lately, it seems like every big moment finds her stick.

Through 25 games of the 2025–26 PWHL season, the Ottawa native and Charge forward leads the league with 12 goals, four game-winning tallies and three overtime winners, the last of which ties a single-season PWHL record. Her 19 points rank her among the league’s elite scorers, and she is comfortably the top scorer on an Ottawa team that has quietly scratched and clawed its way into the middle of the most competitive playoff race the PWHL has staged.

The raw numbers are remarkable enough. But the context around them is what elevates Leslie’s season from impressive to genuinely historic in scope. Ottawa entered 2025–26 as a thinner, reshaped squad after the expansion draft and free agency stripped key pieces from the group that reached the Walter Cup Final the previous spring.

Rebecca Leslie is helping Ottawa set records

Expectations were cautious. Instead, powered largely by Leslie’s clutch scoring, the Charge have manufactured points in ways the league has never quite seen before from them.

“What Rebecca has been able to accomplish for us is nothing short of impressive. But what I love the most about her is just her fire. She’s a fiery player, she’s competitive,” head coach Carla MacLeod said about the overtime phenomenon early in the season.

Ottawa has won a record-tying seven games beyond regulation this season, more OT and shootout wins than any PWHL team in a single season. Remarkably, those seven wins in extra time actually exceed the team’s five regulation victories.

No PWHL team in history has ended a season with more overtime wins than regulation wins, and Ottawa is on pace to do exactly that. Leslie has been at the centre of this scoring in overtime against Toronto in December, Vancouver in March and Montreal in Winnipeg with a sold-out crowd of 15,225 fans in the PWHL’s first-ever game in Manitoba.

The Charge have also gone a perfect 5-for-5 in overtime games, the first PWHL team to reach that mark in a single season. Leslie’s three overtime winners tie the single-season record set by Montreal’s Laura Stacey last campaign.

A partnership for the ages with Brianne Jenner

Much of Leslie’s success has been amplified by her partnership with Captain Brianne Jenner. The two have connected on each other’s goals a league-leading 12 times this season, the most such combinations by any two teammates in a single PWHL season ever. It’s a remarkable statistic that speaks to the chemistry Ottawa has built on its top line with the duo sitting tied fourth in league scoring with 19 points apiece entering the stretch run.

The Leslie-Jenner axis has become the engine of a team that, as recently as December, was mired in the bottom half of the standings. A comeback win in Toronto on December 23rd, with Leslie scoring twice to erase a 3–0 deficit and then netting the overtime winner against her former team, was a turning point. Ottawa has quietly won ten of its last sixteen games since that rough start, mirroring the team’s surge from the prior season.

Years in the making

The full weight of what Leslie is doing this season is best understood through the arc of her career. A 171-point, four-year standout at Boston University and team captain, she was somehow passed 70 times in the 2023 PWHL Draft before Toronto selected her 12th in the second round.

She earned a Clarkson Cup with the Calgary Inferno in 2019 alongside teammates who all went on to represent Canada or the USA at multiple World Championships and Olympic Games. Leslie, the only player in Calgary’s top scoring group without a senior international career, then spent four years in the PWHPA during the professional women’s hockey wilderness years, with limited competitive hockey.

Rebecca Leslie spent the inaugural PWHL season with Toronto, posting nine points in 24 games. She returned home to Ottawa for 2024–25, contributing modestly across the regular season before breaking out in the playoffs with two goals in eight games, more playoff production than regular season, a pattern she is now repeating at an extraordinary scale this year.

The Charge re-signed her to a two-year deal last June, a clear sign of belief. She has repaid that faith tenfold.

Charge Head Coach Carla MacLeod publicly mused during the season about whether Team Canada had made a mistake leaving Leslie off their Olympic roster. The question lingered. Rebecca Leslie, meanwhile, just kept scoring.

The playoff picture ahead of Ottawa

The standings heading into the final five games are as tight as the league has seen. Toronto holds the last playoff spot by a single point over Ottawa, with New York three back and Vancouver seven. All three teams play each other multiple times in the season’s final weeks.

Ottawa faces Toronto twice and New York once. These head-to-head results will almost certainly determine the outcome.

For Ottawa, they need Leslie to keep doing what she has done all season. The Charge have been a team that wins close games, wins overtime games and wins because their best player makes something happen when the game is on the line. With the pressure of a must-win stretch ahead, that description might as well have Leslie’s name on it.

The girl from Ottawa, passed once in a draft, Clarkson Cup champion, hometown hero, she is, right now, the most clutch player in the PWHL. And for a team one point outside a playoff berth with five games to go, she may be the only reason they still have a chance.