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PuckPedia looks set to take over as the go-to cap space source for hockey enthusiasts
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Published Jul 10, 2024 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
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CapFriendly, the popular NHL salary-cap tracking website, has finally gone dark.
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Much of the brains behind CapFriendly were snapped by the Washington Capitals a few weeks ago and the deal has now closed. CapFriendly’s URL remains active, but as of Tuesday the pages display the same goodbye message that thanks fans for their years of usage.
This isn’t like 2015, when CapGeek suddenly closed because of the founder’s declining health and there were no replacement for months. There’s already a replacement up and running and ready to seize the day.
PuckPedia has been extant since 2018 and does many of the same things that CF did, tracking contracts, displaying depth charts, and a few other things that CF didn’t do, like listing agents and, more recently, providing a pick-value calculator.
Because of this there’s not exactly a hole that’s been left by CF, but there are some gaps that PuckPedia didn’t have that its creator Hart Levine is now looking to fill.
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Just last week, PuckPedia relaunched its roster management tool, which its calling Puck GM. Built for Puckpedia by Puckdoku creator Taylor Dixon, Puck GM is similar to the Armchair GM tool that had proved so popular for CapFriendly.
Traffic on the site is indeed up, as you’d expect, Levine said Wednesday.
“Definitely saw a bump when the news first came out, and it’s continued to now,” the Edmonton-raised, Los Angeles-based Levine confirmed over the phone.
The news that CF was set to close sped up finalizing site innovations and additions that were already in the pipeline, Levine said.
“The big change was just to go faster,” he said. They rethought the GM tool, a version of which had previously been on the site, and was relaunched on Friday.
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“We have our player dashboard where you can filter and sort by a bunch of different player criteria, hopefully ready to launch quite soon,” he added. “The pick-value calculator has been there a few months.”
Even thought CapFriendly and GeneralFanager were commanding the market when PuckPedia launched in 2018, there were still gaps to be filled, Levine said.
First was the user experience. “Salary cap sites were intimidating to a casual fan, so I wanted a place for a casual fan, someone not that knowledgeable who could find it in a non-intimidating way,” he said.
Then there was how so much hockey information was scattered around the internet. Collecting salary data, scoring stats, roster depth charts, advanced stats all in one place didn’t exist in 2018. He also thought he could make a more interactive site.
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Site and information design was something that several former NHL executives highlighted. CapFriendly excelled at that, noted Chris Gear, who handled contracts for the Vancouver Canucks for many years. CF wasn’t the only place for information, but it was a good starting place much behind-the-scenes discussion.
“CapFriendly was a great tool for fans of the business of hockey and even served as a quick reference for NHL team staff as it was always up to date and often more convenient than official league or team sources of the same info,” he said. Gear also knows Levine and was quick to recommend PuckPedia for fans who’ve yet to try out the site.
1997: Defenceman Ed Jovanovski of the Florida Panthers. Sites like CapFriendly didn’t have some of the league’s hidden information, like a past cap penalty against the Panthers that came from a lost grievance case over the handling of an injury settlement to Jovanovski. Photo by Glenn Cratty /Getty Images
Former Florida Panthers AGM Steve Werier said he’d tried to buy CapFriendly during the 2015-16 season. The way the data was presented was of use to a data-savvy executive who was new in his job, who knew he’d have to explain plans and ideas to colleagues who weren’t up on the ins and outs of the modern salary cap world.
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“We did not have a product like that,” he said. Having a visual tool would have been useful.
In the following seasons, he came to realize how many teams didn’t have a strong understanding of other teams’ cap scenarios and that, in many cases, teams were leaning solely on the publicly available data available at CF.
“It was always astounding knowing that some teams in a billion-dollar business in a publicly available piece of accounting,” he said. “Imagine a Fortune 500 company saying ‘we don’t need a CFO because there’s a publicly available database.’”
CapFriendly was a start, but not a final destination for him. Sites like CapFriendly didn’t have some of the league’s hidden information, like a past cap penalty against the Panthers that came from a lost grievance case over the handling of an injury settlement to Ed Jovanovski.
“You want every possible competitive advantage you can so you want to know your competitors better than they know themselves,” he said.
pjohnston@postmedia.com
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Courtesy : https://theprovince.com/sports/hockey/nhl/vancouver-canucks/goodbye-capfriendly-hello-puckpedia-nhl-fan-cap-tracking-carries-on