How PuckPedia Was Prepared to Answer NHL Salary Cap Questions After CapFriendly

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CapFriendly, the popular NHL salary cap tracking website, has finally shut down.

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The Washington Capitals signed a good chunk of the brains behind CapFriendly a few weeks ago, and the deal is now done. The CapFriendly URL remains active, but as of Tuesday, the pages have been displaying the same goodbye message thanking fans for their years of use.

This isn’t like in 2015, when CapGeek suddenly shut down due to the founder’s declining health and he wasn’t replaced for months. There’s already a replacement up and running and ready to seize the opportunity.

PuckPedia has been around since 2018 and does a lot of the same things as CF, tracking contracts, displaying depth charts, and a few other things CF didn’t do, like listing agents and, more recently, providing a draft value calculator.

As a result, CF did not leave a void, but there are some gaps that PuckPedia did not have and that its creator Hart Levine is now looking to fill.

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Last week, PuckPedia relaunched its roster management tool, which it calls Puck GM. Built for Puckpedia by Puckdoku creator Taylor Dixon, Puck GM is similar to the Armchair GM tool that proved so popular for CapFriendly.

Traffic to the site is indeed up, as expected, Levine said Wednesday.

“I definitely saw an increase when the news came out, and it continues to this day,” Levine, an Edmonton native based in Los Angeles, confirmed by phone.

News of CF’s impending closure accelerated the completion of innovations and additions to the site that were already in the works, Levine said.

“The big change was just to go faster,” he explained. They redesigned the GM tool, a version of which was already on the site, and which 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, and we hope to have that available soon,” he added. “The draft value calculator has been there for a few months.”

Even though CapFriendly and GeneralFanager dominated the market when PuckPedia launched in 2018, there were still gaps to fill, Levine said.

First, there was the user experience. “The salary cap sites were intimidating for a casual fan, so I wanted a place for a casual fan, someone who’s not super knowledgeable, and could find it in a non-intimidating way,” he said.

There was also the amount of hockey information that was scattered across the internet. In 2018, there was no collection of data on salaries, scoring statistics, depth charts and advanced statistics in one place. He also thought he could create a more interactive site.

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Several former NHL executives have highlighted the site’s design and information. CapFriendly excelled in that area, said Chris Gear, who handled contracts for the Vancouver Canucks For many years, CF wasn’t the only place to find information, but it was a good starting point for many behind-the-scenes discussions.

“CapFriendly was a great tool for hockey fans and even served as a quick reference for NHL team personnel because it was always up to date and often more convenient than official league or team sources for the same information,” he said. Gear also knows Levine and was quick to recommend PuckPedia to fans who haven’t tried the site yet.

Former Florida Panthers general manager Steve Werier said he tried to buy CapFriendly during the 2015-16 season. The way the data was presented was helpful to a data-savvy executive new to his job, who knew he would have to explain his plans and ideas to colleagues who were unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the modern salary cap world.

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“We didn’t have a product like that,” he said. It would have been helpful to have a visual tool.

Over the next few seasons, he realized that many teams did not have a good understanding of other teams’ salary cap scenarios and that in many cases, teams were relying solely on publicly available data available at CF.

“It was always amazing to know that some team in a billion-dollar company had a publicly available accounting database,” 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 salary cap penalty the Panthers received after a lost lawsuit over the handling of an Ed Jovanovski injury settlement.

“You want to get every competitive advantage you can, so you want to know your competitors better than they know themselves,” he said.

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