NHL salary cap and contracts website CapFriendly has officially gone dark after being sold to the Washington Capitals. Let's reminisce on what the site meant for hockey and its fans.
NHL salary cap and contracts website CapFriendly has officially gone dark after being sold to the Washington Capitals. Let's reminisce on what the site meant for hockey and its fans.
Wednesday morning, CapFriendly officially shut its doors to the public.
After being purchased by the Washington Capitals in early June, CapFriendly’s sale closed this week and the site went dark after nine years of being the preeminent source of contract data for hockey teams, media and fans.
The ripples of the move could be felt across the NHL community the past 30-some days, jam-packed with the very events that make us all go to CapFriendly in the first place. The NHL Draft, free agency — these are holidays to hockey fans everywhere, and the festivities could be found in dollar signs down to the decimal point on CapFriendly. So many relied on the website until its final moments, with even NHL teams using it on the draft floor less than two weeks ago.
It's the end of the CapFriendly era, and thus it's time to reflect on all it did for us.
It’s inconvenient for the site to close, but I won’t even think to criticize the decision. The site co-partners, Jamie Davis and Dominik Zrim, deserve their big pay day and chance to work with an NHL organization for how much their creation did for hockey. But I do want to take a moment to say thank you to them, the site and everyone who made it possible for so much indispensable information to be at the tip of everyone’s fingers. Because if it weren't for CapFriendly, I wouldn't be writing here today.
See, I’ve been using CapFriendly for a long time. I saw it linked in a blog post back in the 2016 offseason, and I spent hours that summer exploring the site and all its wonderful features. With a huge free agency market in 2016, CapFriendly was my go-to site to look at all the deals. And as I tried to envision how the Detroit Red Wings might shape up for what I thought might be their 26th year of playoff hockey (it was not), I frequented Armchair GM to put the pieces together my way. For a 14-year-old hockey fan, it gave me so much information to truly understand how the NHL works.
CapFriendly was a place where I had all the information at my fingertips, and I could use it to think through the game I loved.
Of course, some of the Red Wings teams I made on Armchair GM were—frankly— terrible. That young, I was no expert on the CBA or contract value. I’m pretty sure that in 2016, I signed Darren Helm to way more than his actual $3.85 million contract, and if I remember correctly I made Danny DeKeyser the highest paid player on the roster. There were other offseason iterations where I lowballed free agents and slapped rookies on the top line. But you better believe Luke Glendening was a lifetime Red Wing, and so was Andreas Athanasiou. And with so many fellow hockey fans on the site’s forums, I assure you that my management follies were well-criticized in the comment sections.
None of those details matter as much as how informed the site made me as a hockey fan, and how its public status allowed me to play with tools that the pros used. It might seem small, but CapFriendly's open access to information allowed me to play like the pros and gain better control of the business of the game. It made me opinionated, and then armed me with the information to put those opinions into words. There’s a file on my Google Drive full of Red Wings blog posts that I never published, but you can be sure they all cite CapFriendly. And when I did start writing publicly, I was sure to use CapFriendly in all of them.
Even up until a couple days ago, CapFriendly was my go-to resource. Whenever contract news broke for free agency, which we extensively covered on this site, I could type "C" on my keyboard and it would autocorrect right to the Red Wings' CapFriendly page. As I typed "C" this morning to see that the site was really closed, I opened up the page to a thank you note from the CapFriendly team.
The real thank yous should go to CapFriendly, who has been the giant whose shoulders we all stood on since its inception. And thank the late Matthew Wuest, the founder of CapFriendly’s predecessor CapGeek, too. In the information age, websites like these allow fans to enjoy hockey from a business perspective that was exceedingly rare beforehand. These tools are to modern fandom what The Hockey News and Sports Illustrated were in days of old.
Now, it’s on to PuckPedia, who has all but cornered the market of contract and salary cap information in the wake of CapFriendly’s privatization. The team for that site has done an impressive job of integrating features that made CapFriendly the industry’s pace car.
While we might not have CapFriendly anymore, we can lean on its successors all the same. But we’ll never forget how important CapFriendly became.
Thank you, CapFriendly.
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