CapFriendly Is Dead. It's Spirit Will Live On.

Will hockey fans really be in the dark when the popular site shuts down next month?

If you follow the NHL closely, you probably didn’t miss the news this week that the Washington Capitals had come to an agreement to purchase CapFriendly, a website that compiles detailed information about NHL player salaries. The deal will see the site’s functionality and tools integrated into Washington’s hockey operations department. Three of the site’s employee’s will also join the Washington organization before the deal closes sometime in July and the shut will be closed permanently. For a team owned by a tech billionaire like Ted Leonsis, the deal seems like a natural.

Here’s a statement from Capitals General Manager, Brian MacLellan:

“The Capitals have agreed to acquire CapFriendly, including its tools and functions, for its in-house hockey operations department. CapFriendly will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes, which is anticipated to occur in early to mid-July, after the conclusion of the NHL Draft and the start of free agency.

This strategic move will provide the Capitals organization with the ability to digest, present and analyze both our internal and league supplied data and will also bring on board Jamie, Ryan and Christopher Davis, talented members of the CapFriendly team, once the deal has closed. The existing infrastructure will be a valuable addition to the team’s hockey operations department in many ways. We anticipate that this acquisition will significantly enhance and integrate the various branches of our hockey operations department, allowing us to strengthen our management, scouting, and player development, in addition to augmenting our salary cap and contractural applications.”

The reaction from the online hockey community was swift, and it’s easy to see why. Hordes of fans as well as members of the media have come to rely on the site to determine how much wiggle room teams have to do deals under the league’s hard salary cap. CapFriendly has been the go to source for this information since it was founded in May 2015. It was at that time that CapGeek, the first site to track NHL player salaries in detail, was shut down by its operator, Matthew Wuest, just a few months before his untimely death due to colon cancer. Perhaps one day, Wuest’s family will get to see him inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the builder category. His work was revolutionary and he deserves to be remembered.

If you’re a fan of the Washington Capitals, you should cheer this development. CapFriendly was created by a group of former NHL front office employees, and it’s clear that the team determined it was easier to buy the site and hire the talent that built it than to attempt to recreate that functionality internally on their own. The three men who the Caps are bringing on board are very savvy. Over time, their smarts may very well to prove to be more valuable to the organization than the site itself.

But if you’re a fan of any other team, or one of the teams that had previously contracted with CapFriendly for their services, then you might feel a touch distressed. For those of you in this category, I have good news. To paraphrase a great man I once had the privilege to work for, the Internet is an infinite canvas and software is paint with which programmers create great works of art.

What has been created and destroyed twice, will be created again. And in fact, there’s already another site in business that provides similar services for free called PuckPedia. Update your bookmarks. So instead of wailing in the wake of CapFriendly’s demise, we should be rejoicing for its creators as they are being richly rewarded for their hard work.

If they did it, you might be able to do it too.

SportsNet’s Elliote Friedman has reported that relations between the NHL and CapFriendly had been less than fraternal and that the league believes that salary information is proprietary. Despite this, the NHL never tried to take the site or CapGeek to court in order to test that theory. They certainly might have been able to bully CapFriendly into submission via an expensive law suit. My guess is that they opted not to do so because they determined that fans and the hockey media would rise in revolt before the league ultimately lost in the courts on free speech grounds.

So while the NHL might not have liked CapFriendly because it helped expose how teams stashed talented players on Long Term Injured Reserve in order to bolster their rosters ahead of the playoffs, the league likely concluded that they would just have to learn to live with it. Thanks to the Internet, the NHL will have to tolerate a level of transparency that they find distasteful. And thanks to our laws, that won’t change.

Perhaps in a more enlightened future, the league will do what they should have done as soon as the salary cap was implemented, and simply publish the data on NHL.com. But until that time, there’s still a vacuum to be filled and an opportunity for those who know the cap, how to code and crunch the numbers. Get to it.