The St. Louis Blues made contract information for their NHL players publicly available on their site more than a month after the Washington Capitals bought CapFriendly.
The St. Louis Blues launched a contract tracker that differs from the norm for NHL teams.
The team announced the new section of their site on Wednesday, making a reference to capfriendly.com, an NHL salary tracker that went private in mid-July after the Washington Capitals acquired the company.
"CapFriendly may be gone... but BluesFriendly is here," said the Blues' X (formerly Twitter) account.
St. Louis' new tracker includes the annual cap hit, term, expiry status and acquisition information for each player on its NHL roster and/or players on one-way contracts, the site says.
The grid goes until the 2028-29 season, although four players are under contract beyond that campaign: Colton Parayko being signed through 2029-30 and forwards Jordan Kyrou, Robert Thomas and Pavel Buchnevich under contract through 2030-31.
Launching the page received positive feedback on social media, with some saying every NHL team should do this, others saying it provides more transparency in the league and some saying it's just flat-out cool.
While NHL teams often announce contract details when signing players, such as the average annual value, term and sometimes the salary breakdown by year, not all teams provide the financial information in an announcement, let alone list their contracts together online. The league also keeps salary information for each team private, such as total cap hits, cap space and long-term injured reserve information.
"GMs have access to information," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in 2015. "The tools that we have for internal business use are different, but everything we do internally for business purposes doesn’t necessarily need to be made public and be the object of discussion."
Despite capfriendly.com's closure to the public, other third-party sites gather reports and announcements of contract information to display for the public, including puckpedia.com, TheHockeyNews.com/lineups, sportrac.com and more.
While the Blues determined the basic details of their NHL contracts were of public interest, time will tell whether other teams or the league will follow.
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