Days after the Ottawa Senators announced a multi-year agreement making Fullscript an official partner of the hockey club and title sponsor of the organization's 'Black, Red, & Gold Gala,' the Senators and Fullscript have launched a new tool called 'Sens Contract Central' that is now accessible via the Senators' official website.
Between 2015 and 2024, CapFriendly was widely regarded as the best publicly available resource for capturing and publishing contractual information for each NHL player and organization in an easily navigable database. Thanks to its real-time accuracy and ease of use, the site was routinely used by journalists, hockey executives and fans as a tool to support their specific individual interests.
When its owners, Jamie Davis and Dominik Zrim, announced that they had sold the site to the Washington Capitals in June 2024 and would be officially closing its doors to the public one month later, it sent shockwaves through the hockey community.
Absence creates opportunity. Many understood and acknowledged that without CapFriendly, another site would rise to assume its mantle. The issue was that these sites take time to develop and refine, especially given the benchmarks and quality standards that CapFriendly established. Its success fostered a level of expectation among its users.
On the hockey side of it, the loss of CapFriendly created a vacuum. Forward-thinking organizations would have read the landscape and understood that they cannot rely exclusively on publicly available sites. Any simple risk assessment would have identified that from the perspectives of self-preservation and avoiding business disruption, it is in every organization's best interests to create its own proprietary internal database.
In Ottawa, a partnership was formed over a game of golf.
Kyle Braatz, a Senators minority owner and the owner and CEO of Fullscript, was playing golf at an event with the Senators' senior vice-president of hockey operations, Dave Poulin.
Poulin mentioned the closure of CapFriendly and how it would impact some of the organization's internal processes when Braatz expressed that Fullscript specialized in developing software and could help the organization overcome this obstacle.
Fullscript is an Ottawa-based software company that has created a leading healthcare platform helping medical practitioners support patients with personalized wellness plans, lifestyle guidance, high-quality supplements, and industry-leading lab results, all in one place.
In speaking with Fullscript's director of medical innovation, Andrew Krause, he explained how, on the surface, it might not seem like a medical software company is a natural fit to offer its services to a professional hockey club, but at the underlying level, there are many similarities.
"Our team organizes what software we build and how we build it to make sure that when we're building for healthcare providers, that we're considering all of their needs really well," Krause stated while describing how Fullscript meets the needs of its clients. "Our team also does data validation and evidence validation, making sure that there's merit in what's being recommended and where things go in the application."
Instead of building a medical platform, Fullscript pivoted to create a comprehensive contractual database with an intuitive user interface, offering the opportunity for future upward scalability and comprehensive functionality.
"When CapFriendly was purchased, we wanted to look into a way that we could get that information, but work it into an internal tool for our staff," said the Senators' director of analytics, Sean Tierney. "Fullscript, as part of the (Senators') ownership group, made their team available to us to see if we could develop a solution.
"They put their development team at our disposal to make a plan on how we could replicate what we were getting from CapFriendly."
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The Fullscript development team, which is comprised of many avid Sens fans, were immediately made available to Tierney and the rest of the Senators' hockey operations department.
Fullscript has a team of approximately eight to nine people managing the day-to-day operations and development of the software. However, there have been four occasions during the past year where groups of 20 or more Fullscript employees have participated in 'Hackathons.'
"We have a whole host more people that will occasionally work in these events called what we call 'Hackathons,'" Krause detailed. "We've held them at the Canadian Tire Centre four times over the last year, where we had a specific project or goal or feature that we're trying to build."
The first two of these collaborative efforts took place last July and August to create the inaugural working version of the project.
Although Fullscript took less than 48 hours to create a core build, it took several months to develop a functioning CapFriendly equivalent that allowed the front office to log in and access necessary information.
"We tackled that part first," Tierney stated. "(Fullscript) were incredible at understanding the problem, bringing their skills to bear. They're doing it all because they love the team and, they love hockey. They wanted to help out. So, we were able to build that part out first to get that cap information."
One of the things that I never understood about the Senators was how they failed to leverage their situation and fandom in many respects. Thanks to their success and competitiveness in the late '90s and early 2000s, many hockey analytic experts who became well-recognized within their field identified as Senators fans while growing up. Instead of capitalizing on this opportunity and hiring many of them to create and develop an analytics department, the organization willingly neglected an easily identifiable path that would have given them a competitive edge.
Now with Fullscript, a software company within the tech capital of Canada, the Senators are relying on a local business to help develop proprietary software that can hopefully give them a competitive edge now and in the future.
It can help to have local people who are invested in the product working collaboratively to develop effective solutions.
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"We had some preamble," Krause recalled describing the formative building process. "There were a lot of conversations, mainly between me and Sean (Tierney), on making sure that we understand (its purposes).
"What are the needs? What are we trying to accomplish here? What data points we want to show? How do we want to show it? What's the experience like? All that actually takes a decent amount of time to be able to sort through. We had some conversations with Steve (Staios). It's a conversation with Dave (Poulin) and Sean (Tierney) facilitating as a lead-up to us doing the build itself, but we hit the core of the build in a little over a day for the baseline aspect. But that was only possible because of all the data sources that were already present."
Once the Senators and Fullscript had a functional base, the next steps focused on delivering customization and features.
"The next wave of personalizing it for what we want internally is ongoing," said Tierney. "Now we're taking the next steps to add our own internal information into the site, so things like video, scouting, reports, analytics to turn it into a tool that's got all the information that we want for our front office, that we can quickly look up players, quickly look up teams, and then just use it to make more informed decisions.
"It's something that for Steve, he's on it every day. It makes it easy for him when all the information is in one spot. He doesn't need to search across the internet. He's got Senators information and cap information and reports and all that's available to him at a click."
Since that initial build, features have been added over the last year, and it will continue to grow. However, Tierney has been impressed with Fullscript's commitment and the speed at which they have been able to add new features that not only provide information but do so in a clear and easily translatable way.
"They've been quick," Tierney acknowledged with a nod and smile. "They've been really quick."
It takes a unique skill set to separate and present information effectively without it being too cluttered and muddied for hockey operations personnel to grasp properly. Having a former school teacher as their director of analytics helps, but having tools that can help them communicate more effectively and identify what to do when opportunities arise is invaluable.
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"We need to make sure that we show the right information in the right place at the right time," Krause remarked while illustrating the importance of clearly presentable information. "A lot of what we do on the software side for practitioners is about how we mind that: making sure the thing that you need to dig into is in the right place.
"If I've got a patient in front of me, I don't need all of the information that's available about the supplements or the recommendations. I need to focus on my time with the patient. But at another time, that may be my time to dig in. It's similar to how we're building software for the Sens, where you want to make sure that the information is accessible, but you don't just want to have so much noise on the page, where it's busy."
Creating a product for the present that offers room for future growth will be vital for some of this organization's most important decision-makers. It certainly never would have happened in the past, but now it should instill in fans a sense of confidence that this organization is modernizing and can escape the mistakes of the previous regime.
"It is about developing the kind of tools that would help them with their decisions as time goes on," Krause stated. "We have a really strong solution right now that can help them day to day.
"But, there's also a bunch of other things that will help them communicate even more effectively about what they want to do, or even model out what they want to do in clear ways and see the downstream impact."
That is all on the private and proprietary side of the project, but with today's announcement, the Senators and Fullscript have released a workable CapFriendly-like page that is accessible for fans and details all of the organization's salary and contract information.
In an era where fans crave any available information, it presents an opportunity to attract more fans to the Senators' site and get them invested in the team and its product.
"It's an opportunity to share information with (Fullscript), that's part of the ownership team, where the public is really thirsty for information," said Tierney. "This is a way that we can provide something that isn't private information.
"It's stuff that's out there, but put it onto our page and make it accessible easily for fans on our sites. I thought it was an opportunity to share more and draw fans in more with information on the team."
'Sens Contract Central' is not designed to be a competitor with sites like PuckPedia. It intends to serve Senators fans and provide information related to their hockey club, but its presence will highlight how Fullscript is more than a major sponsor whose logo will adorn the team's white road helmets or the Canadian Tire Centre's ice.
This is a local company that is working hard behind the scenes to help this front office bring home this organization's first modern Stanley Cup.
By Graeme Nichols
The Hockey News/Ottawa
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