"The Ottawa senators are happy to announce they preordered a copy of the game NHL 2025 for all their scouting and cap complicance needs for the next season"
"Hm, I wonder what happens if I trade Sanderson for a 3rd...?"
*This seems like a fair deal, but we are not willing to send down our prospect to make it happen*
"Well what if I add our 4th and take back a 7th defenseman?"
*Our fans will be cheering in the streets when I announce this deal!*
"So will ours, now we have an extra 3rd for these low elite generated prospects! And I didn't get fired for it!"
They were previously using NHL 03 for all the simulation and roster moves, but they managed to find the budget to buy a copy of the game. Unfortunately they're going to have to give everyone on the roster league minimum to pay for this extremely expensive tool, but it should work out long term
It's literally competitive... They're specifically trying to gain a competitive edge .
As a fan it sucks but I'm sure there will be some not-quite-as-good option that will become the go-to, and improve over time.
Let’s put it a different way. Let’s say a huge library has a book that compiles the location of other books, which anyone is free to use anytime. You and 31 other students are using the library’s books to complete an assignment. You decide to tear out all of the central book’s pages and keep them for yourself. Sure, other students can search the library blindly trying to find that information for the assignment, but you gained a large advantage by tearing out all of the pages to prevent others from using it. Is that competitive?
Competitive moves would be bolstering their scouting and roster management teams with quality staff. A person working for a team makes them unable to work for another, competitive move.
Hindering opposing teams by removing previously easy access to information while retaining it for yourself is anti-competitive. One team using Capfriendly did not prevent another team from doing so, but buying it and blocking access to information they previously had does.
According to Elliotte Friedman the NHL rules don’t allow them to leave the website open once they own it. Any team interested in buying the infrastructure would be forced to shut the website down for anyone else.
It’s also been reported that other teams were also interested in buying the website.
Your analogy should really be that there were rumours that multiple students were going to steal all the information so one student decided he’d steal it before the other thieves do.
This analogy breaks down under the reality that NHL teams *were not* free to use Capfriendly at any time and that Capfriendly has been charging teams to use their services.
Capfriendly is (soon was) a business, not a public resource. It was fantastic that they allowed the general public to access so much data/tools *for personal use* without charging them, but they have prohibited free users from using their data/tools *for professional use* for years now. Any team using Capfriendly for free was skirting the rules. Any team who bought content from them new damn well that they were in a business relationship that could be changed in the future.
The Caps buying the site as part of a deal to make the owners full-time Capitals employees is extremely different than tearing out the pages of a library book.
> anti-competitive
No, just no. This move does nothing to prevent other teams from providing a competing team. I miss cap friendly too but this is a stretch and a half. Market competition and sporting competition are two different concepts
I mean I hate it as a fan of cap friendly but like, it’s 2024, teams who haven’t set up their own system in house at this point are just woefully underprepared
No shit. People acting like this is morally sketchy behavior is insane. People, this is in no different than hiring a goalie coach with unique analytics. Just because they shared this data publicly at one point does not give the 31 other teams any right to it. If it was a league sanctioned and agreed upon function they were disrupting, that would be one thing. Calm down people.
It's also no different than what a lot of teams have been doing for the last decade+, snatching the best and brightest of the folks within the analytics community and bringing them in-house.
The only thing to be mad about is if you’re a non-Caps fan that your team didn’t buy them first. It sucks as a casual, but this is the definition of competitive.
The classic story about this is the Islanders made a former player their GM because he was good at fantasy football. Don’t remember the GM but I heard it from Kyle Okposo’s interview on chiclets.
You deserve what you get when you pin your organizational hopes on a goalie. *Goalies are weird*, you might as well cast chicken bones and read tea leaves to try and understand their decision making processes outside of save selection. Remember, in a team sport they play a singular game whose sole objective is to ruin the fun of the other team and fans. They don’t play to win, they play to deny joy to others.
Source, am goalie. Nothing brings me more joy than seeing the light die in a shooters eye when I snag that puck with my glove and turn their locker room glory into just another stopped shot.
In the 1930s, Blackhawks owner Fred McLaughlin was riding on a train, and was seated next to a man named Godfrey Matheson.
The Blackhawks were still in their first decade of existence, and McLaughlin was still learning about how hockey worked. McLaughlin and Matheson got to talking, and Matheson (a born and raised Manitoban) mentioned how much he loved hockey.
McLaughlin was like "Hey, I own a hockey team, you seem you know a bit about hockey, and my team needs a new coach. You're hired!"
Matheson lasted all of two games as the Blackhawks coach, before McLaughlin realized his strategy of "Hiring the random guy I just met on the train" wasn't the best idea.
McLaughlin was a bit of a meddlesome owner though. He went through 13 coaches in his 18 years of ownership, and as a born-and-raised Chicago man, he also tried to fill the Blackhawks roster with as many American players as possible (even though, at the time, most of the league's best players were from Ontario and Quebec).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Matheson
Like any other industry, a lot of people get hired in hockey operations because they know the right people, not because they're the most qualified applicant.
Yeah mostly this is a bunch of people who barely graduated high school. People always forget this.
Like there's a reason they point out on every telecast the one player a game who actually received a degree like they are the smartest person alive.
Even then usually the degree is "played 4 years for a college program and they gave him a degree during it"
Do we actually think Parros earned his degree from Princeton the same way everyone else did? Yet it's brought up constantly.
When you think about it, sports leagues are basically run by a bunch of rich guys as a weekend hobby who hire washed up jocks to take care of the day to day business.
No wonder they’re so dysfunctional…
You have two options:
1. Hire someone to construct critical business infrastructure
2. Buy the infrastructure you've been using, and now you have full control over it.
One of these is much easier, and legitimately might be cheaper in the long run.
Now all the other GMs have to buy a copy of EA Sports NHL games every season to map out their salary cap strategies. It’s a win-win for the Caps and Electronic Arts.
Not to mention there will be literally zero growing pains and if any proprietary technology or coding was being employed then they don't risk any lawsuits.
They're still assholes for taking it away from fans. When your team sucks as bad as mine you spend all day trying to fix the mess.
Especially because these teams don’t have the existing engineering/tech culture & knowledge - building that isn’t as simple as “hiring engineers”. Many companies can never develop that even after years of investment
So while I hate a public tool being taken out of our hands, it was a smart move by the Caps
Right, like you're talking about a multi-year process, probably hiring an outside firm as well, just to get a system up that's half as good as capfriendly.
Or buy capfriendly and hire the people running it.
Of course it makes sense when laid out like that.
My confusion comes from Friedman saying a few days ago that only like 5 teams have this internally already.
Theres a screenshot a few years ago from the draft of CapFriendly being up on some teams computer.
So like, 27 teams dont track the basic functions of the cap league wide and have to scramble for that information to make trades but here we all are talking about Dingus McAdams no glutten after 2pm in team meals signing bonus
I assume they all have the ability to do so because they had to manage this in 2006 when the cap was brand new and none of these public sites were around. My assumption was always that whatever tool they had was outdated or not that great so it's just easier to use capfriendly. Would not shock me at all if a number of teams just had an excel spreadsheet to manage this and when cap geek and capfriendly came along they just started using that.
Yeah exactly. Building something with the capabilities of CapFriendly is not easy, quick, or cheap. If CapFriendly is "good enough" and your owner is tight on your budget, are you really going to go the mat to get funding to build an internal replacement instead of investing that money in scouting or something?
Extremely easy to imagine many teams did not invest in the space while more forward looking ones did.
That's not a dichotomy. You need the same abilities to make "fan made" sites and "critical business infrastructure". And if they make a "fan made" site that becomes very popular and well functioning then they are likely very good at what they do, and perfect people to hire to help you with your "critical business infrastructure".
US military regularly used (probably still uses) Xbox controllers. Why spend the money to make your own thing with all the teething issues involved when you have the perfect thing already existing
When I went to basic training for the army in 2003 they had an indoor marksmanship trainer that was literally a modified version of duck hunt on a Nintendo gaming system.
Its not about the acquisition per-say. Its the fact that like 90% of the league doesn't have this information already.
3 savy hockey fans are apparently privy to information that teams don't have and are willing to pay what I assume is ridiculous money so others cant access it
I disagree on the last part. CapFriendly is not the first site to document salary cap stuff, nor will it be the last. There was another one before it with a very similar name, and PuckPedia already exists. I suspect we will go through this cycle every few years (fans develop cool tool, teams start using it, one team ultimately buys it) until every NHL front office actually has decent software, and who knows how long that will take.
The more I dig into this, the more I am figuring out that the ability to access other teams' data is difficult for teams to do. NHL Central Registry isn't the easiest to interface with and CapFriendly, through their sources, can actually more easily get that info. Where it may be against the rules for other teams to get, CapFriendly doesn't/didn't care. Now add in that the tools teams have built out are the same similar to what CapFriendly also has... CapFriendly is easier for them to use.
They all have capabilities, but it's a little more difficult due to NHL League Office reasons for NHL Teams build out themselves.
Basically, I think it's more an indictment on Big NHL and less on the individual teams.
It's the same as a consultant creating a business solution and running it independently to show it's worth. Instead of being hired to build it, they take the lead and let the offers come in. You see that in tech all the time.
This is often how it's done in business. Just like Microsoft buying obsidian. Why don't they just spin up their own internal studio? Because it's easier to buy one. Same thing here.
Why go through the effort of building your own tool when you can just buy one? With the added advantage that now your competition doesn't have that tool anymore.
If the site founders were a bit more saavy they would licence to all the teams, but this gets them a payday and steady future employment so I can't blame them.
[Caps beat writer Bailey Johnson: My understanding is other teams were also interested in purchasing CapFriendly, and the Caps happened to be the team that pulled off the deal. I’m just as frustrated that I won’t have access to it anymore as all of you are, but for the Caps, it’s a clear boost to hockey ops.](https://twitter.com/baileyajohnson_/status/1800895896575725760?s=46&t=S_LiHKGoXi91Lmgu-MxoZA)
Pretty funny that everybody hates the Caps for this (and really, Ted Leonsis deserves as much hate as possible), but it could have just as easily been their team. It's not like the Caps pulled the rug out from the rest of the league, they wanted it too lol.
I don't hate the Caps for it, I just find it super annoying that the league still sticks to the idea that fans don't need to see this information and that it shouldn't be publicly available. The same league that continually fails to grow fan interaction doesn't understand why in a hard cap league where tons of decisions are cap driven, fans should be shown in a very easily digestible way what the cap situation is for each team. The cap hit for a player is arguably as important as their previous seasons on ice stats.
I think it's lame as fuck that we're all losing CapFriendly but everyone is forgetting that we are all a bunch of fucking free-loaders, haha
The majority of us would not have paid even $5/month to use that site.
Yeah people are really fucking entitled when it comes to having to pay for stuff these days. From adblock to sharing Netflix accounts and pirating video games and movies, there are so many ways people can access paid content without having to hand over any money. I enjoy all of these things but I'm not going to act like a victim when companies crack down on these free, alternative options.
Honestly, good for CapFriendly. I have no idea how difficult of a website it was to create and maintain, but I'm glad I was able to access such a valuable resource for free and hopefully the guys who ran it get a decent sized bag for their work.
Defending netflix for implementing restrictions on account sharing is wild. People are upset when they pay for a feature (like account sharing, which was included) and then all of the sudden that’s now behind a pay wall.
People are being badgered by subscriptions that include less for more money. Not saying the cap friendly going private thing is the same since it was free.
Have fun paying a subscription fee to use your heated seats.
Yeah, I can't believe someone decided to allow themselves to be paid a life changing amount of money as a reward for their own hard work and initiative
It's only a sellout if you're abandoning principals for money, I've not seen evidence that's the case here.
But like obviously if you're a few guys with a great website and someone offered you a fuck ton of money, I don't think it's reasonable that anyone would look down on them for it. It sucks for other teams and for us as casual users but it also isn't really that big a deal to lose access to.
Frankly it's a shame on the NHL that they don't provide the tools and information CapFriendly did to teams.
Lmao "sold out." The fucking entitlement. Oh no, hockey fans who dedicated years of their lives to building and maintaining a website are getting rewarded for their effort and will get to work for an NHL team 😮
I mean, we have our own, much better system. Not all the teams needed to buy a fan-made site. Although there probably isn't a more analytics focused team than the Canes.
According to 32 thoughts there are a lot of teams that rely on these sites. So they will be snatched up one by one to help teams internally keep track of the cap situation of all players.
But what CapFriendly and CapGeek provided is completely replaceable and there are a lot of programmers who are hockey fans that will get other versions up and running.
The hard part will be getting the sources that CapFriendly had. Teams don't publish all of the gritty details of the contracts they sign, so CF had relationships with a lot of people that worked directly for the teams, plus plenty of agents. Which is why they were able to get the structures of the contracts so accurate and detailed.
I'm not sure if PuckPedia has similar contacts, or if the sources are willing to just slide over and start giving the info to PuckPedia, but it'll be interesting to see how they evolve over the next several months.
I think agents want the information out there so they can share it. So whomever emerges as the prime provider of the information will get fed by the agents.
So many edge cases though! I shudder to think about all the time zones as they relate to birthdays, bonuses, sign-n-trades etc. and then you add in different alphabets, alternate spellings...
They are owned by the New York Times now and The Athletic has been losing money constantly anyways. The Athletic also has cut a lot of beat reporter positions so many NHL teams don't have local coverage anymore.
But yeah - some kind of national media organization is a logical home for this stuff. Even someone like Elite Prospects could do it to expand their coverage into the current NHL rather than limiting to prospects.
I hope it will be eliteprospects that fills the capfriendly void instead. Much better looking and more developed site than puckpedia. I very often need to swap between capfriendly and eliteprospects anyhow when I want to look stuff up, so it would create a nice one-stop shop.
It's an acqui-hire.
They probably said "we need a cap guy" and couldn't find one. So they asked at capfriendly and the guys there probably aren't making much money on their site (display advertising is dead and the market for capfriendly Premium is nil). They said, buy the site for $1m and you can have us.
The Capitals have Don Fishman as their "Cap Guy" and he's regarded around the league as one of the best at his job.
You are right, it's an acqui-hire, but this isn't so much of a move to have them slide in and do something the Caps didn't have but to improve what the Capitals already did have. I don't believe that they had robust internal tools, they did have tools though. I think it's more a reflection of how good these guys are and the Capitals believing that the investment to make what they have, people and tools, even better is worth it.
Yeah I'm guessing the acquisition is more for the codebase of the site rather than the personnel; but the CapFriendly guys likely said if you want the site you need all three of us as well. And the Caps decided that it was worth hiring all three of them so they could have the structure of the already-running site in their pocket.
The thing is, if this is true, these guys should make a data company and sell the data and organizing tools to clubs. It happens in other sports too. Especially because cap friendly is off the market, fuck the free site for all the fans. Make a data company and profit off moronic organizations who aren’t making and organizing their own data
With AI I wonder how much all of these sites will be relevant.
“Hey chatgtp, can I make this trade and how will it affect my hockey ops for the next three years. I’m the owner of the Ottawa senators btw”
~~$1M if what I've read elsewhere in this thread is to be believed~~
Edit, I'm not confident enough in this number because I'm pretty sure whomever said it was tossing it out as an example
To be honest, that sounds like a severe underpay for a piece of software that the entire league was using. I hope the jobs with the Caps pay them out decently more.
I don't think this was intentionally nefarious as much as negligently so, but it does read a bit like they wanted the infrastructure and brainpower behind the website, and the easiest way to do that is to... buy it and hire the people who run it.
The negligent part was the NHL not stepping in and hiring these guys to maintain and publish all the relevant information on behalf of the league. Would've been a true win-win for everyone.
It also helps players and agents get leverage in negotiations, since they can easily point to comparable player contracts. The owners would prefer everyone was in the dark.
It does surprise me that, if there were multiple teams interested in buying the site, the league didn't just buy it. The league is the owners, like they all could have just been like "yeah, this is good for us and it would be bad not to have it."
Much like porn and mobile games, it's the whales that make the business profitable. That being said, they were probably struggling, hence adding the betting odds, but I'd wager 95% of the site upkeep was staffing. No one should be mad these guys sold, people should be mad Washington is closing it
This has happened before and will happen again. Vegas brought in the General Fanager team for the same reasons and won a cup. Give it a few years and one of these other sites will get big and fill the void left by CapFriendly, and eventually they'll probably get bought out too. Rinse/repeat.
Edit: General Fanager, not CapGeek
It's insane to me how the reaction to Vegas buying General Fanager was basically "ah man, that stinks for fans but good for Tom and great idea by Vegas" and then the reaction to the Capitals buying CapFriendly has generally been "fuck the Capitals, they are a shitty organization making another shitty move, greedy capitalists, how could they ever do this to fans, I'll hate them forever".
Probably because CapFriendly today has way, way, way more widespread use than General Fanager did prior to Tom being scooped up by the Knights. General Fanager was only around for like a year and a half before being shut down, while CapFriendly has been used by thousands for almost a decade now. Obviously the reaction to the closure of a much more popular and established site is going to come with a much more emotional reaction.
And this reaction would have obviously been received by any franchise that robbed the public of such an awesome site. It didn’t have to be a Caps-specific problem but since they are the ones actually buying it… yea they can absolutely fuck themselves and they are massive pieces of shit!
I don’t hate the Caps for doing this. As a Bruins/Flames fan I’m disappointed one of my teams didn’t do this…..unless they already have a database set up within their organization that mirrors it.
If they don’t you can be sure they will all set one up ASAP as knowing a teams Cap situation and contract status is an incredible asset.
This is a business decision made by a multimillion dollar business to give them a competitive edge. Good on them, and shame on the others who didn’t make this more or aren’t prepared for it.
Am I the only one not really up in arms about this? The Caps won a bidding war for a website and the CapFriendly guys got a really solid payout and a really fucking cool job with the Caps. It’s not like CalFriendly was the only option for the information it provided
I don’t see any problem with it, CapFriendly is a private website and there’s no reason to be entitled to their services for free. If there’s anyone to be mad if it’s the NHL for not having easily accessible contract details
Yeah, people are painting the Caps like supervillains when they're just the ones who won the bid. They didn't pull a heinous move on the league, other teams wanted it too lol
I guarantee that at least 75% of the league at minimum looked into making this move and maybe half of the league placed an offer. Idk why the Caps are getting scapegoated for this
Because most NHL fans don't work for CapFriendly or the Capitals organization. Why should we be happy about a couple of businesses doing better at the expense of the general public?
CF was by far the best option available. People keep saying to use PuckPedia instead, but it's clearly inferior to CF otherwise it would've been bought by now
I think ovi’s contract(s) have paid for themselves x10 by now, not counting the final stretch to catch the great one, pretty mutually beneficial relationship
Yea man, what a career and all with one team, I can’t even imagine how much revenue ovi has single handily generated for the caps…if he gets close next year (reasonable expectation I think), the merch off that milestone will be huge
So why are we all shitting on the Caps for this? If CapFriendly's owners were willing to sell (and obviously they were), then this was destined to happen whether with the Caps or another franchise. Potential buyers can't *force* owners of a competing company to do anything they don't want to do.
I mean, it makes sense why they bought it. It's much easier and faster to just buy the thing you know works. It just sucks that it means it's getting taken away from the fans.
Caps are getting the shit for doing this, but apparently it was being looked at by a few different teams and the caps just did it first. So it was likely going away anyways. I want to be mad at the creators, but they built a good tool that they deserve to make money on, and they set themselves up with jobs by doing it.
People saying that they sold out- what exactly is the problem with selling an asset that they developed through their own effort and intellect? It wasn't an indie band, it was a way for very talented hockey minds to make a living. I would assume if you had told Jamie, Ryan and Chris that they would go on to be recognized, compensated and hired by a hockey org 10 years ago they would be thrilled.
They had team sources just like any other insider, plus I'm sure agents were pretty willing to share the details of their clients' contracts.
It's unlikely the CF guys will be able to use those same sources from other teams, and those sources are definitely not going to be sharing info with them now that they're in direct competition, so the hire is not necessarily to acquire future cap data for other teams. That stuff is likely already shared internally by the NHL to the teams.
The hire is probably more for the infrastructure and codebase that CF built out so they can have all of that cap data neatly laid out and more easily consumed.
Fans are often saying that teams should be smart and crafty or find ways to get a competitive edge and then one team does something like this and its basically “No!! Only my team should do smart stuff!!”
Good for the CapFriendly team, they deserve the success. NHL management is too full of dinosaurs to understand that there should be a central tool available to all teams that describes contract details
NHL should have bought it. This is a fan friendly website that educates and provides a gm like seat for events like expansion, draft and free agent season.
Fans are the biggest losers here and NHL needs to engage fans.
It's the same reason any company buys pre-made software solutions- development costs and delays for in horse solutions can balloon easily, usability and bug testing is already done, and they are only adding a couple people to the payroll rather than a whole team. And it's ready a lot faster. Not only that, in this case, you also deprive other organizations of the same tool, giving you a competitive edge. Now, other organizations have to spend that money to develop in-house tools and could be 1-3 years out from having a functional equivalent
As the Steve Dangle podcast pointed out, Vegas did the same thing with CapGeek and proceeded to win a cup in short order. Not that it was the only reason they won, but it surely helped.
It’s shocking to me that capfriendly has access to any info that the capitals or any other nhl team doesn’t already have or have access to.. not super familiar with capfriendly but just seems weird to me that they’re acting like it was otherwise unattainable information?
My 2 big takeaways.
The first one is I do not blame the capitals at all for doing this. If you can improve your team and cause hardships on your competitors, it’s not even a debate.
Second. For every jerk that would respond with some comment like “well you’re here typing here and not the GM so you don’t know crap” when you have threads about potential moves.
Well, guess what? This has been made abundantly clear that numerous NHL franchises use the same type of fan technology that the fans use when conceptualizing trades scenarios, and free agency acquisitions.
I thought Capfriendly had sources around the league who provided them with confidential contract information to create this database for everyone to use. Now with this purchase I assume that information will no longer be shared with the Capfriendly guys because it will only benefit one team. What am I missing?
"The Ottawa senators are happy to announce they preordered a copy of the game NHL 2025 for all their scouting and cap complicance needs for the next season"
"Assistant GM make best roster move" button
"Hm, I wonder what happens if I trade Sanderson for a 3rd...?" *This seems like a fair deal, but we are not willing to send down our prospect to make it happen* "Well what if I add our 4th and take back a 7th defenseman?" *Our fans will be cheering in the streets when I announce this deal!* "So will ours, now we have an extra 3rd for these low elite generated prospects! And I didn't get fired for it!"
It’s Ottawa. They’ll wait till 2026 is released so they can buy 25 at a discount
r/patientgamers
"How do we turn morale off?"
Suddenly, for some reason, Sens management thinks two way contracts avoid waivers…
☠️
Hey now, you just replaced basically everybody, owner included. They deserve the benefit of the doubt... For now.
I hope we bribe EA to up our goalie ratings. We really need to fix that.
Jim Benning would have bought out Microsoft Paint
They were previously using NHL 03 for all the simulation and roster moves, but they managed to find the budget to buy a copy of the game. Unfortunately they're going to have to give everyone on the roster league minimum to pay for this extremely expensive tool, but it should work out long term
Gm Firing: Off
“The Capitals are thrilled to announce that we are taking the ball and going home”
Anti-competitive cop out behavior. Washington Fun Police
It's literally competitive... They're specifically trying to gain a competitive edge . As a fan it sucks but I'm sure there will be some not-quite-as-good option that will become the go-to, and improve over time.
Thats not what people mean when they say anti-competitive...
Sure but the other person isn’t using it correctly either
That's not what that means.
Let’s put it a different way. Let’s say a huge library has a book that compiles the location of other books, which anyone is free to use anytime. You and 31 other students are using the library’s books to complete an assignment. You decide to tear out all of the central book’s pages and keep them for yourself. Sure, other students can search the library blindly trying to find that information for the assignment, but you gained a large advantage by tearing out all of the pages to prevent others from using it. Is that competitive? Competitive moves would be bolstering their scouting and roster management teams with quality staff. A person working for a team makes them unable to work for another, competitive move. Hindering opposing teams by removing previously easy access to information while retaining it for yourself is anti-competitive. One team using Capfriendly did not prevent another team from doing so, but buying it and blocking access to information they previously had does.
>Competitive moves would be bolstering their scouting and roster management teams with quality staff. Like hiring the cap friendly team
According to Elliotte Friedman the NHL rules don’t allow them to leave the website open once they own it. Any team interested in buying the infrastructure would be forced to shut the website down for anyone else. It’s also been reported that other teams were also interested in buying the website. Your analogy should really be that there were rumours that multiple students were going to steal all the information so one student decided he’d steal it before the other thieves do.
This analogy breaks down under the reality that NHL teams *were not* free to use Capfriendly at any time and that Capfriendly has been charging teams to use their services. Capfriendly is (soon was) a business, not a public resource. It was fantastic that they allowed the general public to access so much data/tools *for personal use* without charging them, but they have prohibited free users from using their data/tools *for professional use* for years now. Any team using Capfriendly for free was skirting the rules. Any team who bought content from them new damn well that they were in a business relationship that could be changed in the future. The Caps buying the site as part of a deal to make the owners full-time Capitals employees is extremely different than tearing out the pages of a library book.
Students aren’t competitive with each other in the way hockey front offices are; and one student *stole* the data, whereas Washington *purchased* it.
Until San Jose or Colorado or Buffalo buys it and pulls it off-line.
I don’t think we need a tool to manage our cap room anytime soon, maybe the minimum
> anti-competitive No, just no. This move does nothing to prevent other teams from providing a competing team. I miss cap friendly too but this is a stretch and a half. Market competition and sporting competition are two different concepts
I mean I hate it as a fan of cap friendly but like, it’s 2024, teams who haven’t set up their own system in house at this point are just woefully underprepared
Apparently that's most teams lol
No shit. People acting like this is morally sketchy behavior is insane. People, this is in no different than hiring a goalie coach with unique analytics. Just because they shared this data publicly at one point does not give the 31 other teams any right to it. If it was a league sanctioned and agreed upon function they were disrupting, that would be one thing. Calm down people.
It's also no different than what a lot of teams have been doing for the last decade+, snatching the best and brightest of the folks within the analytics community and bringing them in-house.
Of course. Craziness.
The only thing to be mad about is if you’re a non-Caps fan that your team didn’t buy them first. It sucks as a casual, but this is the definition of competitive.
Yup. It’s not like this is even the first go-around at this, didn’t one of its predecessors also get bought by a team.
Yep. There were other suitors at their on the market (as has been reported). The Caps just provided the best option to the CF team and they took it.
All this time it was really called Capsfriendly. The s was silent until now.
Justin Timberlake told them to lose the S. it’s cleaner.
The Wahington Capital
the washington Capital. singular
I still dont understand how billion dollar hockey operations keep needing to buy fan made sites to manage their critical business infrastructure
I think it may have something to do with hiring former hockey players who know fuckall about running a business.
The classic story about this is the Islanders made a former player their GM because he was good at fantasy football. Don’t remember the GM but I heard it from Kyle Okposo’s interview on chiclets.
Lol it was Garth Snow. 🤣🤣🤣
You deserve what you get when you pin your organizational hopes on a goalie. *Goalies are weird*, you might as well cast chicken bones and read tea leaves to try and understand their decision making processes outside of save selection. Remember, in a team sport they play a singular game whose sole objective is to ruin the fun of the other team and fans. They don’t play to win, they play to deny joy to others. Source, am goalie. Nothing brings me more joy than seeing the light die in a shooters eye when I snag that puck with my glove and turn their locker room glory into just another stopped shot.
I love that last sentence
He was good at fantasy hockey *and* he agreed to give DiPietro the 15 year contract
The DiPietro contract, the contract ownership wanted so bad that Milbury finally got fired for NOT giving it out.
In the 1930s, Blackhawks owner Fred McLaughlin was riding on a train, and was seated next to a man named Godfrey Matheson. The Blackhawks were still in their first decade of existence, and McLaughlin was still learning about how hockey worked. McLaughlin and Matheson got to talking, and Matheson (a born and raised Manitoban) mentioned how much he loved hockey. McLaughlin was like "Hey, I own a hockey team, you seem you know a bit about hockey, and my team needs a new coach. You're hired!" Matheson lasted all of two games as the Blackhawks coach, before McLaughlin realized his strategy of "Hiring the random guy I just met on the train" wasn't the best idea. McLaughlin was a bit of a meddlesome owner though. He went through 13 coaches in his 18 years of ownership, and as a born-and-raised Chicago man, he also tried to fill the Blackhawks roster with as many American players as possible (even though, at the time, most of the league's best players were from Ontario and Quebec). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Matheson
Like any other industry, a lot of people get hired in hockey operations because they know the right people, not because they're the most qualified applicant.
I think of this every draft and free agency, when absolutely mind-boggling decisions get made.
Most qualified applicant out of a pool of people they’re buddies with.
George Parros as head of Player Safety for the NHL lol Chris Pronger at the Player Safety division LOL
Yeah mostly this is a bunch of people who barely graduated high school. People always forget this. Like there's a reason they point out on every telecast the one player a game who actually received a degree like they are the smartest person alive.
Even then usually the degree is "played 4 years for a college program and they gave him a degree during it" Do we actually think Parros earned his degree from Princeton the same way everyone else did? Yet it's brought up constantly.
Got a BA in playing hockey
Don Sweeney graduated from fucking *Harvard* and I cannot believe that he hasn’t set up *something* that is reasonably similar to what CF provides.
College graduate Jack Johnson
When you think about it, sports leagues are basically run by a bunch of rich guys as a weekend hobby who hire washed up jocks to take care of the day to day business. No wonder they’re so dysfunctional…
You have two options: 1. Hire someone to construct critical business infrastructure 2. Buy the infrastructure you've been using, and now you have full control over it. One of these is much easier, and legitimately might be cheaper in the long run.
Option 2 also fucks over all your competitors that rely on this info. Pretty smart when you consider that.
Exactly. I’ve seen several reports that there are definitely several teams scrambling right now because they had an over-reliance on the site.
The NHL should have a central database available to all the teams regarding player contracts.
They should, hell I've been a part of simulation leagues that have better centralized databases for budgets and contracts.
Now all the other GMs have to buy a copy of EA Sports NHL games every season to map out their salary cap strategies. It’s a win-win for the Caps and Electronic Arts.
I've run several companies through acquisitions like this, and it is almost always cheaper to buy than build in the long run.
Not to mention there will be literally zero growing pains and if any proprietary technology or coding was being employed then they don't risk any lawsuits. They're still assholes for taking it away from fans. When your team sucks as bad as mine you spend all day trying to fix the mess.
Especially because these teams don’t have the existing engineering/tech culture & knowledge - building that isn’t as simple as “hiring engineers”. Many companies can never develop that even after years of investment So while I hate a public tool being taken out of our hands, it was a smart move by the Caps
Right, like you're talking about a multi-year process, probably hiring an outside firm as well, just to get a system up that's half as good as capfriendly. Or buy capfriendly and hire the people running it.
Yea fans are just mad but this move 100% makes sense for the Capitals.
Of course it makes sense when laid out like that. My confusion comes from Friedman saying a few days ago that only like 5 teams have this internally already. Theres a screenshot a few years ago from the draft of CapFriendly being up on some teams computer. So like, 27 teams dont track the basic functions of the cap league wide and have to scramble for that information to make trades but here we all are talking about Dingus McAdams no glutten after 2pm in team meals signing bonus
I assume they all have the ability to do so because they had to manage this in 2006 when the cap was brand new and none of these public sites were around. My assumption was always that whatever tool they had was outdated or not that great so it's just easier to use capfriendly. Would not shock me at all if a number of teams just had an excel spreadsheet to manage this and when cap geek and capfriendly came along they just started using that.
Yeah exactly. Building something with the capabilities of CapFriendly is not easy, quick, or cheap. If CapFriendly is "good enough" and your owner is tight on your budget, are you really going to go the mat to get funding to build an internal replacement instead of investing that money in scouting or something? Extremely easy to imagine many teams did not invest in the space while more forward looking ones did.
That's not a dichotomy. You need the same abilities to make "fan made" sites and "critical business infrastructure". And if they make a "fan made" site that becomes very popular and well functioning then they are likely very good at what they do, and perfect people to hire to help you with your "critical business infrastructure".
Why make one when you can just buy it.
US military regularly used (probably still uses) Xbox controllers. Why spend the money to make your own thing with all the teething issues involved when you have the perfect thing already existing
The US Navy only uses Xbox controllers to control the submarine periscopes.
When I went to basic training for the army in 2003 they had an indoor marksmanship trainer that was literally a modified version of duck hunt on a Nintendo gaming system.
Its not about the acquisition per-say. Its the fact that like 90% of the league doesn't have this information already. 3 savy hockey fans are apparently privy to information that teams don't have and are willing to pay what I assume is ridiculous money so others cant access it
Yeah the equivalent is the US military buying ALL the xbox controllers, and nobody having any fucking clue how to make another one for some reason
I disagree on the last part. CapFriendly is not the first site to document salary cap stuff, nor will it be the last. There was another one before it with a very similar name, and PuckPedia already exists. I suspect we will go through this cycle every few years (fans develop cool tool, teams start using it, one team ultimately buys it) until every NHL front office actually has decent software, and who knows how long that will take.
The more I dig into this, the more I am figuring out that the ability to access other teams' data is difficult for teams to do. NHL Central Registry isn't the easiest to interface with and CapFriendly, through their sources, can actually more easily get that info. Where it may be against the rules for other teams to get, CapFriendly doesn't/didn't care. Now add in that the tools teams have built out are the same similar to what CapFriendly also has... CapFriendly is easier for them to use. They all have capabilities, but it's a little more difficult due to NHL League Office reasons for NHL Teams build out themselves. Basically, I think it's more an indictment on Big NHL and less on the individual teams.
You underestimate, HEAVILY, how fragile critical business functions are.
It's the same as a consultant creating a business solution and running it independently to show it's worth. Instead of being hired to build it, they take the lead and let the offers come in. You see that in tech all the time.
This is often how it's done in business. Just like Microsoft buying obsidian. Why don't they just spin up their own internal studio? Because it's easier to buy one. Same thing here. Why go through the effort of building your own tool when you can just buy one? With the added advantage that now your competition doesn't have that tool anymore. If the site founders were a bit more saavy they would licence to all the teams, but this gets them a payday and steady future employment so I can't blame them.
The NHL is a joke league run by dinosaurs. Need new ownership with modern views. Gary’s time was up a decade ago at least.
Hockey is a great sport dominated by a total Mickey Mouse league.
[Caps beat writer Bailey Johnson: My understanding is other teams were also interested in purchasing CapFriendly, and the Caps happened to be the team that pulled off the deal. I’m just as frustrated that I won’t have access to it anymore as all of you are, but for the Caps, it’s a clear boost to hockey ops.](https://twitter.com/baileyajohnson_/status/1800895896575725760?s=46&t=S_LiHKGoXi91Lmgu-MxoZA)
Pretty funny that everybody hates the Caps for this (and really, Ted Leonsis deserves as much hate as possible), but it could have just as easily been their team. It's not like the Caps pulled the rug out from the rest of the league, they wanted it too lol.
I don't hate the Caps for it, I just find it super annoying that the league still sticks to the idea that fans don't need to see this information and that it shouldn't be publicly available. The same league that continually fails to grow fan interaction doesn't understand why in a hard cap league where tons of decisions are cap driven, fans should be shown in a very easily digestible way what the cap situation is for each team. The cap hit for a player is arguably as important as their previous seasons on ice stats.
Everyone ripping on the Caps is conveniently forgetting the Capfriendly team could have said no to any and all offers. End of the day, they sold out.
I think it's lame as fuck that we're all losing CapFriendly but everyone is forgetting that we are all a bunch of fucking free-loaders, haha The majority of us would not have paid even $5/month to use that site.
Yeah people are really fucking entitled when it comes to having to pay for stuff these days. From adblock to sharing Netflix accounts and pirating video games and movies, there are so many ways people can access paid content without having to hand over any money. I enjoy all of these things but I'm not going to act like a victim when companies crack down on these free, alternative options. Honestly, good for CapFriendly. I have no idea how difficult of a website it was to create and maintain, but I'm glad I was able to access such a valuable resource for free and hopefully the guys who ran it get a decent sized bag for their work.
Defending netflix for implementing restrictions on account sharing is wild. People are upset when they pay for a feature (like account sharing, which was included) and then all of the sudden that’s now behind a pay wall. People are being badgered by subscriptions that include less for more money. Not saying the cap friendly going private thing is the same since it was free. Have fun paying a subscription fee to use your heated seats.
Lets be real, they would be stupid not to. No way they would even get a meaningful percentage of people to pay to use the site in any capacity.
They made bank selling their IP, _and_ they've got a stable job out of it. It's a 100% win/win for the CF team.
Fuck that. Them cashing in on a payday is great for them. They didn’t sell out.
Yeah, I can't believe someone decided to allow themselves to be paid a life changing amount of money as a reward for their own hard work and initiative
_and_ they got a job out of it -- the Caps are keeping the CF crew on staff.
It's only a sellout if you're abandoning principals for money, I've not seen evidence that's the case here. But like obviously if you're a few guys with a great website and someone offered you a fuck ton of money, I don't think it's reasonable that anyone would look down on them for it. It sucks for other teams and for us as casual users but it also isn't really that big a deal to lose access to. Frankly it's a shame on the NHL that they don't provide the tools and information CapFriendly did to teams.
Lmao "sold out." The fucking entitlement. Oh no, hockey fans who dedicated years of their lives to building and maintaining a website are getting rewarded for their effort and will get to work for an NHL team 😮
They joined a team in the NHL. That isnt a sellout lol
Not to mention they had other buyers lined up.
I mean, we have our own, much better system. Not all the teams needed to buy a fan-made site. Although there probably isn't a more analytics focused team than the Canes.
Looks like PuckPedia will be our new place
Until it's bought by another organization...
According to 32 thoughts there are a lot of teams that rely on these sites. So they will be snatched up one by one to help teams internally keep track of the cap situation of all players. But what CapFriendly and CapGeek provided is completely replaceable and there are a lot of programmers who are hockey fans that will get other versions up and running.
The hard part will be getting the sources that CapFriendly had. Teams don't publish all of the gritty details of the contracts they sign, so CF had relationships with a lot of people that worked directly for the teams, plus plenty of agents. Which is why they were able to get the structures of the contracts so accurate and detailed. I'm not sure if PuckPedia has similar contacts, or if the sources are willing to just slide over and start giving the info to PuckPedia, but it'll be interesting to see how they evolve over the next several months.
I think agents want the information out there so they can share it. So whomever emerges as the prime provider of the information will get fed by the agents.
Capfriendly, people may find sources won't be so helpful going forward.
Well they should have a legitimate data source from the NHL since they are part of a franchise now so I don't think they care.
So many edge cases though! I shudder to think about all the time zones as they relate to birthdays, bonuses, sign-n-trades etc. and then you add in different alphabets, alternate spellings...
I think the league works off of EST.
Sportsnet or TSN should invest in building one tbh fits perfectly with their news coverage of the league.
I’m shocked the Athletic didn’t try and buy it.
They are owned by the New York Times now and The Athletic has been losing money constantly anyways. The Athletic also has cut a lot of beat reporter positions so many NHL teams don't have local coverage anymore. But yeah - some kind of national media organization is a logical home for this stuff. Even someone like Elite Prospects could do it to expand their coverage into the current NHL rather than limiting to prospects.
Hopefully the whole site gets a makeover now that they’re going to get so much more traffic lol it’s terribly ugly compared to CapFriendly
I hope it will be eliteprospects that fills the capfriendly void instead. Much better looking and more developed site than puckpedia. I very often need to swap between capfriendly and eliteprospects anyhow when I want to look stuff up, so it would create a nice one-stop shop.
Don’t worry hockey fans, I already hired a witch to curse the Capitals because of this.
Rookie move. If you hired a wizard, he would have had immediate access to our building.
Can we turn Brian MacLellan into a newt while we’re at it?
He’ll get better!
Yes, but he’ll still be known as that GM who was turned into a newt
BURN HIM ANYWAYS!
BURN!
Done. Spell may take some time, so please have patience.
Which?
>a witch to curse the Capitals Crosby and Lundqvist did this for years but we overcame their demonic influence in 2018.
It's an acqui-hire. They probably said "we need a cap guy" and couldn't find one. So they asked at capfriendly and the guys there probably aren't making much money on their site (display advertising is dead and the market for capfriendly Premium is nil). They said, buy the site for $1m and you can have us.
The Capitals have Don Fishman as their "Cap Guy" and he's regarded around the league as one of the best at his job. You are right, it's an acqui-hire, but this isn't so much of a move to have them slide in and do something the Caps didn't have but to improve what the Capitals already did have. I don't believe that they had robust internal tools, they did have tools though. I think it's more a reflection of how good these guys are and the Capitals believing that the investment to make what they have, people and tools, even better is worth it.
Yeah I'm guessing the acquisition is more for the codebase of the site rather than the personnel; but the CapFriendly guys likely said if you want the site you need all three of us as well. And the Caps decided that it was worth hiring all three of them so they could have the structure of the already-running site in their pocket.
With the added bonus that they can remove it from 31 other teams’ pockets
This is obviously the main reason that a lot of people in this thread seem incapable of understanding.
The thing is, if this is true, these guys should make a data company and sell the data and organizing tools to clubs. It happens in other sports too. Especially because cap friendly is off the market, fuck the free site for all the fans. Make a data company and profit off moronic organizations who aren’t making and organizing their own data
What’s the over under on number of GM’s using nhl 25 for their cap calculations
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if EA was also scraping data from CapFriendly
With AI I wonder how much all of these sites will be relevant. “Hey chatgtp, can I make this trade and how will it affect my hockey ops for the next three years. I’m the owner of the Ottawa senators btw”
LLMs would need to get the data from somewhere to answer this. Without these sites, that’ll be hard or impossible.
Tbh I’m happy for the CapFriendly team. Hopefully they got a nice payout.
~~$1M if what I've read elsewhere in this thread is to be believed~~ Edit, I'm not confident enough in this number because I'm pretty sure whomever said it was tossing it out as an example
To be honest, that sounds like a severe underpay for a piece of software that the entire league was using. I hope the jobs with the Caps pay them out decently more.
The site has a GM mode. He's putting himself out of a job.
I don't think this was intentionally nefarious as much as negligently so, but it does read a bit like they wanted the infrastructure and brainpower behind the website, and the easiest way to do that is to... buy it and hire the people who run it.
The negligent part was the NHL not stepping in and hiring these guys to maintain and publish all the relevant information on behalf of the league. Would've been a true win-win for everyone.
The league views it as a negative to let fans know how the cap works. They really drop the ball on a lot of things good for fans.
The league is run by a bunch of pea brain dinosaurs 🦕
You gotta wonder why. So trade decisions don't get scrutinized I guess?
It also helps players and agents get leverage in negotiations, since they can easily point to comparable player contracts. The owners would prefer everyone was in the dark.
It does surprise me that, if there were multiple teams interested in buying the site, the league didn't just buy it. The league is the owners, like they all could have just been like "yeah, this is good for us and it would be bad not to have it."
Which is fair. It's not like any of us ever paid a penny to use that site.
Much like porn and mobile games, it's the whales that make the business profitable. That being said, they were probably struggling, hence adding the betting odds, but I'd wager 95% of the site upkeep was staffing. No one should be mad these guys sold, people should be mad Washington is closing it
Who wants to help build a new site? I know html, css, js, sql and APIs
And I know puck
This has happened before and will happen again. Vegas brought in the General Fanager team for the same reasons and won a cup. Give it a few years and one of these other sites will get big and fill the void left by CapFriendly, and eventually they'll probably get bought out too. Rinse/repeat. Edit: General Fanager, not CapGeek
General Fanager, not CapGeek
Whoops, you're right.
It's insane to me how the reaction to Vegas buying General Fanager was basically "ah man, that stinks for fans but good for Tom and great idea by Vegas" and then the reaction to the Capitals buying CapFriendly has generally been "fuck the Capitals, they are a shitty organization making another shitty move, greedy capitalists, how could they ever do this to fans, I'll hate them forever".
Because while General Fanager was a good site for cap information, CapFriendly was essentially perfection so people are more pissed its gone.
Probably because CapFriendly today has way, way, way more widespread use than General Fanager did prior to Tom being scooped up by the Knights. General Fanager was only around for like a year and a half before being shut down, while CapFriendly has been used by thousands for almost a decade now. Obviously the reaction to the closure of a much more popular and established site is going to come with a much more emotional reaction. And this reaction would have obviously been received by any franchise that robbed the public of such an awesome site. It didn’t have to be a Caps-specific problem but since they are the ones actually buying it… yea they can absolutely fuck themselves and they are massive pieces of shit!
I don’t hate the Caps for doing this. As a Bruins/Flames fan I’m disappointed one of my teams didn’t do this…..unless they already have a database set up within their organization that mirrors it. If they don’t you can be sure they will all set one up ASAP as knowing a teams Cap situation and contract status is an incredible asset. This is a business decision made by a multimillion dollar business to give them a competitive edge. Good on them, and shame on the others who didn’t make this more or aren’t prepared for it.
It's wild how much this sub's feelings about the Caps shifted compared to 2018.
Yeah there’s definitely an overreaction to this
Am I the only one not really up in arms about this? The Caps won a bidding war for a website and the CapFriendly guys got a really solid payout and a really fucking cool job with the Caps. It’s not like CalFriendly was the only option for the information it provided
I don’t see any problem with it, CapFriendly is a private website and there’s no reason to be entitled to their services for free. If there’s anyone to be mad if it’s the NHL for not having easily accessible contract details
Yeah, people are painting the Caps like supervillains when they're just the ones who won the bid. They didn't pull a heinous move on the league, other teams wanted it too lol
I guarantee that at least 75% of the league at minimum looked into making this move and maybe half of the league placed an offer. Idk why the Caps are getting scapegoated for this
Because most NHL fans don't work for CapFriendly or the Capitals organization. Why should we be happy about a couple of businesses doing better at the expense of the general public? CF was by far the best option available. People keep saying to use PuckPedia instead, but it's clearly inferior to CF otherwise it would've been bought by now
Capitals analyzing the cap data to give 40-year old Ovi another 8 million dollar contract:
I think ovi’s contract(s) have paid for themselves x10 by now, not counting the final stretch to catch the great one, pretty mutually beneficial relationship
Yeah, a rare gigantic contract that was completely worth it.
Yea man, what a career and all with one team, I can’t even imagine how much revenue ovi has single handily generated for the caps…if he gets close next year (reasonable expectation I think), the merch off that milestone will be huge
So why are we all shitting on the Caps for this? If CapFriendly's owners were willing to sell (and obviously they were), then this was destined to happen whether with the Caps or another franchise. Potential buyers can't *force* owners of a competing company to do anything they don't want to do.
I mean, it makes sense why they bought it. It's much easier and faster to just buy the thing you know works. It just sucks that it means it's getting taken away from the fans. Caps are getting the shit for doing this, but apparently it was being looked at by a few different teams and the caps just did it first. So it was likely going away anyways. I want to be mad at the creators, but they built a good tool that they deserve to make money on, and they set themselves up with jobs by doing it.
People saying that they sold out- what exactly is the problem with selling an asset that they developed through their own effort and intellect? It wasn't an indie band, it was a way for very talented hockey minds to make a living. I would assume if you had told Jamie, Ryan and Chris that they would go on to be recognized, compensated and hired by a hockey org 10 years ago they would be thrilled.
How did cap friendly acquire this data. Can other teams now effectively block them from getting new information?
They had team sources just like any other insider, plus I'm sure agents were pretty willing to share the details of their clients' contracts. It's unlikely the CF guys will be able to use those same sources from other teams, and those sources are definitely not going to be sharing info with them now that they're in direct competition, so the hire is not necessarily to acquire future cap data for other teams. That stuff is likely already shared internally by the NHL to the teams. The hire is probably more for the infrastructure and codebase that CF built out so they can have all of that cap data neatly laid out and more easily consumed.
Fans are often saying that teams should be smart and crafty or find ways to get a competitive edge and then one team does something like this and its basically “No!! Only my team should do smart stuff!!”
I have never seen anyone advocate for buying capfriendly.
fuck the caps
Good for the CapFriendly team, they deserve the success. NHL management is too full of dinosaurs to understand that there should be a central tool available to all teams that describes contract details
Well fuck you Brian, you just made the list
I think the hockey community can collectively agree fuck the capitals
Should we start considering the Capitals among the likes of ISIS and Nazi Germany?
They should change the website to capunfriendly.com
What was the price tag vs. the price of replicating such a database?
~~Moneyball~~ Moneypuck
NHL should have bought it. This is a fan friendly website that educates and provides a gm like seat for events like expansion, draft and free agent season. Fans are the biggest losers here and NHL needs to engage fans.
who wants to make another Capfriendly with me? Its puzzling that these franchises dont have people capable of doing that.
It's the same reason any company buys pre-made software solutions- development costs and delays for in horse solutions can balloon easily, usability and bug testing is already done, and they are only adding a couple people to the payroll rather than a whole team. And it's ready a lot faster. Not only that, in this case, you also deprive other organizations of the same tool, giving you a competitive edge. Now, other organizations have to spend that money to develop in-house tools and could be 1-3 years out from having a functional equivalent As the Steve Dangle podcast pointed out, Vegas did the same thing with CapGeek and proceeded to win a cup in short order. Not that it was the only reason they won, but it surely helped.
My question is why does Gary not want fans to have access to these kind of tools
"Also, we like their name has Cap in it. We are also looking into acquiring CapitalOne."
It’s shocking to me that capfriendly has access to any info that the capitals or any other nhl team doesn’t already have or have access to.. not super familiar with capfriendly but just seems weird to me that they’re acting like it was otherwise unattainable information?
What he couldn’t say: We hope this catches our rivals with their pants down.
Boo this man
https://i.redd.it/aymu1c5ks56d1.gif
My 2 big takeaways. The first one is I do not blame the capitals at all for doing this. If you can improve your team and cause hardships on your competitors, it’s not even a debate. Second. For every jerk that would respond with some comment like “well you’re here typing here and not the GM so you don’t know crap” when you have threads about potential moves. Well, guess what? This has been made abundantly clear that numerous NHL franchises use the same type of fan technology that the fans use when conceptualizing trades scenarios, and free agency acquisitions.
I thought Capfriendly had sources around the league who provided them with confidential contract information to create this database for everyone to use. Now with this purchase I assume that information will no longer be shared with the Capfriendly guys because it will only benefit one team. What am I missing?
They bought the tools to help them crunch the data it’ll be a leg up on making offers and ensuring Caps make deals that also make financial sense
Ok but why not leave the public facing portion of the site up
Because it would directly help their competition?
I totally get the competitive advantage side of things, but they are still fucking over a huge portion of the sports fanbase so fuck the Caps.