What Looked Like Spam Turned Out to Be the NHL Making History in Edmonton
Three women just made NHL history at Oilers development camp — and it started with a text one of them almost mistook for spam.
Caitlin Kraemer was in the car with her dad when the text came in. An unfamiliar number, a name she recognized but wasn’t expecting to hear from directly — Stan Bowman, general manager of the Edmonton Oilers, asking if she’d like to skate at the team’s development camp.
She almost didn’t open it.
“I thought it was spam,” she said later. It turned out to be one of the more consequential text messages in the history of Rogers Place.
This week, Kraemer, Abbey Murphy, and Chloe Primerano became the first women ever invited to skate at an NHL development camp — not as a guest appearance, not as a photo op between drills, but as part of the roster. Fourteen forwards, eight defencemen, five goaltenders, and three women’s hockey players who happen to be among the best in the world at what they do.
An Out Of The Blue Text From Chicago
Bowman didn’t dream this up in a boardroom. He’d known Murphy for close to eight years, going back to Chicago Mission, the youth hockey program where his sons played. Murphy grew up around that same rink, around that same family, and somewhere along the way, it turned into something closer than a scouting relationship.
“I grew up with his boys playing at Chicago Mission,” Murphy said. “I’ve just kind of grown that relationship with their family, and now I get to skate with his youngest daughter Graycen, who is like a little sister to me. We skate a bunch in the summer.”
That’s the part of this story that doesn’t make the highlight reels — a GM whose family spent summers on the ice with a kid who’d go on to become an Olympic gold medalist, and who eventually looked at that relationship and thought: why not bring her here?
He reached out about a month before camp. Murphy, Primerano, and Kraemer all said yes without much hesitation.
“You don’t decline something like this,” Murphy said.
Three Different Roads To Rogers Place
Murphy arrives with the kind of résumé that makes the invitation look less like a gesture and more like a hockey decision. She left the University of Minnesota as the program’s all-time leading goal scorer, won Olympic gold with Team USA in Milan this past February, and was picked second overall by the Seattle Torrent in the 2026 PWHL Draft — a little over two weeks before she laced up in Oilers colors.
Primerano, 19, made history of her own back in 2022 when the Vancouver Giants took her in the WHL Prospects Draft, the first woman ever selected in that league. She chose the NCAA route instead, and she’s spent the past two seasons at Minnesota alongside Murphy. She won’t be eligible for the PWHL draft until 2028, which makes her, in a strange way, the camp’s longest-term prospect — Oilers or otherwise.
Kraemer, 20, plays for Minnesota-Duluth and holds the all-time scoring record for Canada’s National Women’s U18 team. She’s the one who nearly deleted the text that started all of this.
None of the three arrived expecting to make Edmonton’s opening-night roster. That was never the premise. What they got instead was three days of ice time against NHL-calibre prospects, drills alongside all five of the Oilers’ 2026 draft picks, and a locker room that, by every account so far, treated them like they belonged there — because they did.
“They’ve been nothing but respectful toward us,” Murphy said. “It’s been a blast so far.”
Primerano put it more simply. Pulling on an Oilers jersey, she said, was “a really cool experience” — the kind of sentence that undersells exactly how large a moment it actually was.
Why This One Lands in Alberta
Hockey culture runs deep and specific in this province — it’s in the 6 a.m. ice times in Red Deer, the minor league car pools in Grande Prairie, the backyard rinks that show up every December whether or not anyone asked for them. Rogers Place sits at the center of a lot of that, not because it’s the biggest building but because it’s the one everybody already has an opinion about.
So when three women who came up through that same culture — rec leagues, junior programs, U18 tournaments most fans never watch — get let onto that ice under Oilers colors, it registers differently than a press release about inclusion. It’s a specific building, a specific GM, a specific text message that almost got ignored. That’s usually how the NHL stories that actually stick with a place get told.
We’ve covered plenty of the province’s economic milestones this year — energy, technology, the numbers that make the national headlines. This one doesn’t come with a dollar figure attached. What it comes with is a hockey province watching three women get a fair shot, for three days at Rogers Place, right alongside everyone else invited to camp.
The development camp wraps Thursday with a three-on-three tournament. Somewhere in that mix, Kraemer, Murphy, and Primerano will be on the ice with Edmonton’s newest draft picks — the ones who spent this past weekend hearing their names called in the draft in Buffalo, the way Kraemer once heard her name called from the front seat of her dad’s car.
Sources:
NHL.com — Murphy on Oilers development camp invite: ‘You don’t decline something like this’
NHL.com — Murphy, No. 2 pick in 2026 PWHL Draft, among 3 women invited to Oilers development camp
NHL.com / Oilers — RELEASE: Oilers announce 2026 Development Camp roster
Oilersnation — Three women invited to Oilers development camp as roster released
Daily Faceoff — Three top women’s hockey players named to Oilers’ development camp roster
Yahoo Sports — Why Oilers invited 3 women, including Abbey Murphy, to join their NHL development camp
The Hockey News — Primerano, Murphy, Kraemer To Attend NHL Development Camp With The Edmonton Oilers
