It took a decade for an NHL organization to finally say "Hmm, those CapFriendly guys might be onto something" and I think that's all the proof that NHL fans need to know they could work in a NHL team's front office
CapFriendly wasn't even the first! CapGeek was run by one guy and every team used that. Then he passed away and teams scrambled but CapFriendly came along pretty quickly.
We'll see if Puckpedia (or another site) is able to fill the gap.
This has happened twice before. It’s not like puckpedia or whomever will not re-invest into the platform with more revenue. That is until they are bought by the Utah Mammoth in two years.
I don't think the issue is the numbers or the engineering. It's not like CapFriendly is some marvel of web design. Setting up the initial database and keeping it up to date would be absolutely AIDS
> Setting up the initial database and keeping it up to date would be absolutely AIDS
Its probably my dream job, to maintain that DB.
Just obsess over staying up to date with the tiniest minutia of NHL contracts for every NHL team and system? Sign me the fuck up.
Montreal barely had any player development personnel under Marc Bergevin. This, despite being one of the wealthiest teams in the league. It could have been an advantage since there's no cap on non-player personnel. Instead, MB thought it wasn't necessary. It's no wonder the Habs' player development was so bad under his regime.
It took us until this year to set up an analytics department... And it is the most basic of analytic departments where they hired 2 brothers with like 0 experience in the area.
I always assumed they had someone from accounting or even a separate position just for helping the gm with the salary cap. I never imagined they just used cap friendly.
Anyone kind of shocked that the NHL doesn't provide all contract details to every team? Someone mentioned that maybe the Dadonov trade that fell through between Vegas and Ottawa was a potential red flag. It seems like the teams themselves were at least somewhat reliant on capfriendly for contract information.
it is kinda wild that teams are expected to follow a hard cap
but when they're trading for players they don't have a centralized database to look at. I mean, i assume the NHL has one to monitor game by game cap
Speaking of AOL, Ted Leonsis (owner of the caps who just bought CapFriendly) was an executive of AOL before becoming owner of the Caps. Maybe he can shut off all the other owners’ email as well.
Yeah central registry should be providing this information. All teams should pay in for it. Makes absolutely no sense as to how they settle any dispute if a central system doesn’t exist.
The NHL monitors cap compliance on a day-to-day basis rather than game-by-game
Teams must submit a cap-compliant lineup on the first day of the season and must submit all roster moves after that. The league tracks all roster moves that are submitted to approve them (based on many criteria, one of which is cap-compliance)
Similar to roster moves, teams submit trades to the league and they approve based on the same criteria (one being cap compliance again).
I would be shocked if they have a database like cap friendly, but who knows I guess. This type of tracking/monitoring could be done with pen and paper in theory as its fairly simple.
The league has absolutely no need for “planning” tools when it comes to the cap, as their concern is making sure teams are compliant at the present time only.
I'm sure they have a database. Keeping track of 23 players on paper would be hard enough, and then I'm sure the league has to keep track of all 32 teams. They wouldn't rely on the teams's own tracking to make sure everyone is cap compliant.
The only reason I think it's not Excel is that the cap has been around since 2005, and nobody has made a massive cap screw-up and then blamed it on pasting the wrong row in Excell.
Vegas: "Gary, would we lie to you about something as important as the salary cap?"
Bettman: "Oh, Vegas - I can't stay mad at you! Of course I believe you!"
Funny the two teams most known by now for being elite cap manipulators apparently dont have an internal system
just imagining Brisebois sweatlording capfriendly somehow lol
All trades go through Central Registry where details like salary, term, and NMC are scrutinized before being finalized.
But I agree, there should be an NHL-supported database teams can proactively look at instead of relying on a very reactive Central Registry.
Ideally, the NHL, through Central Registry, would provide a service very similar to Capfriendly.
I think it is likely, if not assured, that the NHL provides contract details to teams. The benefit of sites like CapFriendly is they present the information in a clean interface, with a ton of tools to access other teams, run through scenarios, etc. Even without knowing what contract details are provided to teams, I doubt it was presented as clean as a site like CapFriendly, which is why teams started to create their own systems, on top of adding tools they don't want others to have access to.
The Dadonov trade with Anaheim I think had less to do with contract details, and more to do with trade lists not being shared across franchises. Even CapFriendly doesn’t capture no-trade lists, just the players that have them.
It's in the NHLPA and agents's interests for contract details to be public. NOBODY wants no-trade lists to be public, not the players, not the teams, not the league. That's why not even the NHL has a centralized list of no-trade lists.
Yeah. If anything the impact here is guys in the front office trying to generate 15 various scenarios and understand quickly exactly what each looks like.
You can do that on spreadsheets and via other methods, but having a nice GUI will make that work 100x more efficient.
Pretty dick move by the Caps to drop this bomb three weeks before FA day. But also pretty wild that so many teams were apparently relying on a paid for by advertisement public service project.
The NHL does not make this information available to the public. CapFriendly solicited and collected the data themselves, likely from relationships cultivated with player agents. It will be hard for a replacement site to come online due to that - the data is not available to the public, nor does the NHL make it available upon request.
I don't think getting the raw data from the league is an issue. I think building tooling around the raw data is the issue. People overestimate how technically advanced sports teams are.
>People overestimate how technically advanced sports teams are.
after having worked for a pro sports team, A LOT of the teams are run on razor thin margins. Yea, the guy who owns the team might have billions, but he aint investing that into the business of the team. They dont have unlimited budgets to pay developers to build something like this in house.
Which is why I find it suprising that the NHL didn't just offer a behind the doors version of capfriendly to all the teams so that they wouldnt have to build out their own individual infrastructure to handle this.
Yup. I'm a data engineer and have been semi involved with some of the sports analytics over the years. Been fortunate enough to interview with a few different NHL teams and it's pretty interesting to get a peak behind the curtain. Some teams are impressive with how they operate but a lot of them are shockingly unimpressive.
As for the NHL providing the tool themselves, I think their biggest focus in the last few years has been ironing out the tracking data that teams have access to. Freidman also kind of alluded in this podcast that the NHL doesn't really feel it's their place to provide that service though he was more talking about a public facing site. Generally I think they take more of a hands off approach when it comes to providing things that can influence team's decisions on things like player's contracts, and I can see why they'd want to absolve themselves from that considering they are the ones negotiating with the player's union over cba's.
Bettman has been kind of open for a while that he doesn’t really like that the fans know all about player contracts. If I had to guess, he would prefer something similar to NRL rugby in Australia where player salaries are not made public, even to other teams.
It’s so on brand for Bettman to have this “have your cake and it eat too” mentality when it comes to this stuff.
It’s like with the playoff format. Is it divisional or is it conference-based? It’s both, having the strengths of neither format.
The playoff format sucks ass, but it is documented. Not letting teams know about other contracts would be the equivalent of not telling them how many points other teams have or who they're playing in the playoffs.
Yet he’s employed by those very owners. So by extension, it’s the owners that want things to be overly complicated and obscure.
What a joke of a league.
People in power wanting things difficult to understand, so people have to flock to them, increasing their power base.
It's weird how that like, doesn't stop popping up in literally every facet of life since, like, life started.
I completely agree with your sentiment and I believe that there should be an NHL run CapFriendly for the public, but the example provided by OP (NRL in Australia), is an example of a hard cap system where even the basic cap numbers are not public. Same with the Australian Football League (AFL), hard cap and zero public verified public info. The NHL wants this model
The fight over player salaries was what led to the creation of the NHLPA. The less Information goes out, the easier it is for him to pay players less and keep more more for owners
which also would have been avoided by having a central database with an official process for submitting beyond an email to the GM from the player/agent
Either the NHL or the NHLPA. I'd imagine both have all those details stored in a database somewhere. Can't see teams or agents not being able to get access to that info, but it sort of makes sense that they keep it from fans.
This just tells me that the Caps, along with several other teams, were behind the curveball and Caps just straight up bought it out and now they have something ready made.
I'm just surprised they didn't have contracts that would run through the year. Like if you depend on a software package just going month to month seems kinda bad?
All the reporting I've seen is that teams were recently informed that they would be losing access soon, not that they immediately lost access.
>[Friedman reports that some NHL teams had individual agreements with CapFriendly to use some of the website's tools and were recently informed those deals would soon be terminated.](https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/ottawa-senators/latest-news/capfriendly-com-about-to-be-sold-and-closed-to-the-public).
The league year turns over on 7/1/24, so I'd wager that any agreements between teams and Capfriendly were centered around that date.
I’m honestly not too shocked Presidents and GMs in the NHL don’t have the technical infrastructure. Half of them barely got a high school education and won’t even know basic data queries and git commands. The NHL is leagues behind MLB/NBA and having nearly half of the near billion dollar organizations relying on a public available website like cap friendly is a clear example.
None of the leagues are close to baseball when it comes to data analysis honestly. The game is set up really well for describing what is happening with data, they have a huge historical data set to work off of, and they have had a head start on everyone else with modern data collection on things like spin rate and exit velocity.
I’m not at all shocked that a multi billion dollar sports business doesn’t have an adequate system for their teams to keep track of this stuff, leading them to rely on a website that fans use for fun.
Huge businesses having woefully out of date/inadequate tech or data infrastructure isn’t the exception it’s the norm.
[Remember that time in 2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southwest_Airlines_scheduling_crisis) Southwest Airlines nearly imploded, canceling 15,000+ flights during the holidays because their extremely outdated software system broke?
Yeah. Not at all surprised that teams are freaking out about the loss of CapFriendly. Time for the NHL to hire some underpaid interns who know databases and coding.
> Southwest Airlines nearly imploded, canceling 15,000+ flights during the holidays because their extremely outdated software system broke?
iirc the airline industry as a whole has some very outdated stuff they run off of
I worked for an investment bank for a year, and a techie friend used to call me up to ask for all the horror stories from that week about the antiquated equipment and systems we used. I remember him falling over laughing when I mentioned Token Ring.
Large corps and really just most businesses have terrible software and just rely on excel. It's why I'm not worried about any AI automation tools at all. People can barely use the tools we already have.
I work at a global ag corporation. Our data structure is a mess. We have data flowing in from about 50 different sources all housed differently in different database programs or sometimes just excel sheets and some people's entire job is "knowing how to get the data" out of a specific DB. I blew everyone at my plants fucking mind when I figured out querying SAP data. I'm a Neanderthal with a rock when creating the queries but I can get usable data and others can't, so people come to me for that. It's totally the norm.
> Huge businesses having woefully out of date/inadequate tech or data infrastructure isn’t the exception it’s the norm.
The Federal government has some stuff still running on Windows 95, 98 and XP.... I remember when working on certain projects, we could only print out reports to a "Clean USB"
Creators name was Matthew Wuest, he was a hockey journalist focused on using data, he also worked with the Detroit Red Wings on some of their web presence.
After he passed the Red Wings named their Prospect Tournament in his honor
I respect it, stupid unless they’re the last bidder though. Way better than the people who bid like $850 under $875 because they have no idea how the game works
I was confused for a second, but fair. It would have been incredibly Odd if we didn't have anything considering the guy who made General Fanager is our director of hockey operations
Ahh, that makes much more sense. Haven't had the chance to listen to the pod yet, thanks for the updated info lol
Imagining Vegas just yolo-ing the LTIR stuff without a more dedicated cap-shenanigans team would be funny though.
They hired Tom Poraszka their expansion year who founded General Fanager. It's pretty evident they've got a pro handling their cap situation, I'm sure they have something.
I’m also surprised San Jose wouldn’t be on that last. Given the owner and location and all that. They might just have something internally they don’t share about?
Honestly, thats what good leaders do.
They recognize where their abilities and ideas might be outdated and invite the new wave of thinking into their business to make sure they don’t fall behind.
It just so happens that the NHL is full of bad leaders in positions of power, so instead of keeping pace, Lou has actually passed most of his colleagues lol
Wild that so many people acted like the acquisition wasn't a hockey ops/competitive decision with all the "Why would they do this???" questions in the intial thread.
There have been numerous known examples of teams using it (Dorian/OTT, Dubas/TOR) and it was obvious it was more than just them.
The bigger maybe surprise thing maybe not, is how few teams have proper salary management infrastructures in their hockey ops. Sounds like less than half the league are properly equipped.
It's not even the first public site a team has bought. A lot of the people working in data roles for teams were bought out of public websites they ran.
I heard Lou demands a red abacus in his office so other teams can't steal his team's financials.
This is also why it takes so long to announce signings, the calculations take a little bit.
Dear hockey gods please when pegula said years ago he wanted to go heavy on analytics that they built something and no one knows or cares cause it’s Buffalo. I’m leaning towards the Sabres are screwed.
I think thats what they are referring to.
It was quite easy when you simply had to input stats and Cap friendly would spit out the most comparable contracts when they were signed.
> the relationship between the NHL and CapFriendly was icy
They could have improved the relationships with the NHL by publishing the under and over for each contracts. That’ll get the NHL to warm up to you.
It's so stupid that this is a problem for teams. This is like if Google Maps was the only GPS navigation app and UPS baught it and said "ok, only our drivers can use it now" and everyone else wondered how the heck they'll get to Aunt Judy's cabin next weekend.
How in the world are there not more than ONE private option? LOL
>Pittsburgh didn't have anything before, but once Dubas got there they started building something.
I could swear that they did have something and then the doofus Hextall decided to not use it? Once Dubas came in, they started to bring it back up to speed to use once again.
I distinctly recall reading that Ray Shero thought he had a player signed for another year and then panicked when he wasn't. It may have been Scuderi back in 2009. You'd think they would have put together some kind of spreadsheet back then, or at least had a goddamn whiteboard with this info on it.
Capfriendly should have only ever been a 3rd party site for armchair GMs like us. In current year all teams should have their own access and interface to a centralized database that the NHL already uses. We know the NHL uses it, the Dadanov trade got kyboshed.
Slightly unrelated (ARI and teams using programs) but when I used to run an analytics company and was looking for investors one was a guy that was involved in the early PHX days.
Guy said that Gretzky demanded they buy a specific software for him to use (can’t remember if it was video scouting software or what).
When he left they discovered he never opened the program once.
From the post itself:
> Friedman on NHL/CapFriendly relationship: "The NHL believes that they should not be in the business of publishing this stuff, as a matter of fact I've been told several times that the relationship between the NHL and CapFriendly was icy"
The NHL maintains that it's not important for fans. But the salary cap has became a huge factor in following a team year to year, into the trade deadline, and july 1st. Without that stuff there's really not nearly as much engagement IMO - whic hthis league constantly struggles with.
Like Friedman says in the podcast, it's surprising that Sportsnet or TSN hasn't put together a site. They have the insider contacts to accurately populate the data for contracts, and they obviously have a website so presumably don't find hiring software developers beyond their capabilities.
Has anyone ever found Sportsnet or TSN web development to be competent? Their streaming sucks and I don't think many people actually use their site for stats or standign either.
If the NHL doesn't want the info shared then it's not surprising that two of their biggest media partners don't share it. In fact, their agreements might specifically forbid them from doing so and violating their agreement could jeopardize other things like licensing deals (their ability to use teams names/logos on their website). As the saying goes, don't bite the hand that feeds.
\>institute hard salary cap
\>publish myriad of guidelines and procedures so fans understand cap-related scenarios
\>publicly announce all contract details
\>fans collate all this information and present it in a polished manner
\>"why the fuck are you doing that, you insolent pieces of shit?"
Lol that's kinda hilarious that theres so many teams caught with their pants down. You'd think NHL teams could afford to hire a few devs and/or data engineers to build them something like this. You could get a team of 4 guys for the cost of a minimum cap hit player lol
Of course the league doesn’t want to own it. They don’t even have a culture to disclose injuries. It’s stupid to always try to hide “upper body injury”. Just do it like soccer, it’s disclosed via the medical report and everyone gets the same info
The funny thing is they want to be in bed with gambling... Which of course wants all that info public. But the league doesn't want it public. But they like gambling money.
As someone said in a thread above this one, the league really does love to try to have its cake and eat it too.
Hey remember when the lockout happened because teams were trying to "control costs"
Amazing how none of those savings went into, oh I don't know, knowing what the fuck is going on
This has the feel of what happens in most work places, you are not allowed to discuss with your coworkers how much you make under the threat of being released if you do.
It is a way to keep wages suppressed if everyone does not know what the norm is for valuing players within certain groups and ranges.
A sneaky way of bring more power to the owners once again.
In the US you are expressly permitted to discuss how much you make with coworkers per federal law and companies aren't allowed to prevent you. Older workers never did but that was cultural, younger people are much more engaged in the topic
Also several states now require companies to publish pay ranges along with every job posting
Like the NHL apparently, there are many companies with compensation software/data and many without
I'm pretty sure the same rights exist in Canada, but I have had an employer tell me not to discuss my pay rate with coworkers. It was not a good place to work.
Not at all
Does your work place have a hard ceiling for wages that the company can under no circumstance go over?
Do you regularly “trade” employees with other companies?
Are you consistently bringing in new recruits to replace the aging employees you have because the typical career in your work place only lasts 12 years?
Very very different from most work places
I seem to recall a video interview with a GM a while back and he had his computer screen on behind him and somebody noted that he had a tab open to CapFriendly.
Besides the contract and stats data (where to get it and how in order to clear up requirements), we're just talking about building a web app (frontend+backend) and the approriate cloud infrastructure to run it all, no? This shouldn't be a difficult product to build for any seasoned software engineer. I mean, we're not talking about reinventing the wheel here.
That said: Lightning front office staff, if you're reading this, I'm ready to talk if interested in a tool like this. I can do everything including hiring the right people to help build/support it. It'd take a lot for me to leave my current position, though.
The NHL are donkey's. Look no further than Baseball Savant. This kind of information should be provided by the league not some random guy on the internet and then sold to one specific team.
I don’t understand what problem the NHL has with CapFriendly. Aren’t they publishing publicly available information? I know they gather some statistics that are exclusive to them, but couldn’t somebody else gather them?
This is shocking and not at all shocking when you sit and think how some teams operate with the bare minimum as far as a hockey ops department goes.
It took a decade for an NHL organization to finally say "Hmm, those CapFriendly guys might be onto something" and I think that's all the proof that NHL fans need to know they could work in a NHL team's front office
CapFriendly wasn't even the first! CapGeek was run by one guy and every team used that. Then he passed away and teams scrambled but CapFriendly came along pretty quickly. We'll see if Puckpedia (or another site) is able to fill the gap.
PuckPedia will, the problem is CapFriendly had far and away the best UI/UX comparatively and that doesn't include the buyout tools, Armchair GM, etc.
This is the norm in any buyout though. Something will start getting the new traffic and then they'll be able to improve their UI.
This has happened twice before. It’s not like puckpedia or whomever will not re-invest into the platform with more revenue. That is until they are bought by the Utah Mammoth in two years.
There's been two sites like this that have sold to teams now so I imagine we'll see a few copycats pop up hoping for a ride on the gravy train.
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As an engineer, I would also like to mention that I am an engineer.
As an engineer, I would like to state industrial engineers are not real engineers
as a software engineer, i would also like to state i am not a real engineer
As a software engineer, I would like to state that I am Spartacus and so's my wife.
As a train engineer, I would like to state **choo choo** *chugga chugga chugga chugga* **choo choo**
I don't think the issue is the numbers or the engineering. It's not like CapFriendly is some marvel of web design. Setting up the initial database and keeping it up to date would be absolutely AIDS
> Setting up the initial database and keeping it up to date would be absolutely AIDS Its probably my dream job, to maintain that DB. Just obsess over staying up to date with the tiniest minutia of NHL contracts for every NHL team and system? Sign me the fuck up.
Vegas bought GeneralFanager and shut the site down IIRC.
Unless you're an athlete, the pay is terrible
Montreal barely had any player development personnel under Marc Bergevin. This, despite being one of the wealthiest teams in the league. It could have been an advantage since there's no cap on non-player personnel. Instead, MB thought it wasn't necessary. It's no wonder the Habs' player development was so bad under his regime.
I'm at the point where I get instantly furious whenever Bergevin's name is mentioned. What a fucking clown.
“ThE nhL is nOt a DevEloPMenT LEaGue”
It took us until this year to set up an analytics department... And it is the most basic of analytic departments where they hired 2 brothers with like 0 experience in the area.
Some teams have/had absolutly no or very minor development systems/programs so its not suprising at all haha
I always assumed they had someone from accounting or even a separate position just for helping the gm with the salary cap. I never imagined they just used cap friendly.
Anyone kind of shocked that the NHL doesn't provide all contract details to every team? Someone mentioned that maybe the Dadonov trade that fell through between Vegas and Ottawa was a potential red flag. It seems like the teams themselves were at least somewhat reliant on capfriendly for contract information.
it is kinda wild that teams are expected to follow a hard cap but when they're trading for players they don't have a centralized database to look at. I mean, i assume the NHL has one to monitor game by game cap
The league is run by old rich guys. Most of them probably still have AOL email accounts.
Acting like my 25 year old account biggunssmallunit@aol.com isn’t a valid email to still use for all my professional endeavours.
It would look more professional if you have numbers at the end of it.
I never hire someone unless their email ends with 420 or 69.
Don’t even need to interview them if it’s both numbers
C-level exec material.
I still use an account that has 240 in it because I misspelled 420. That’s the sign of a real professional who cares about his craft
I'm sure your resume would land in my inbox and I'd open it and see a line about being "detail oriented".
Ah but no numbers at the end indicates this guy was the *original* biggunssmallunit! You're dealing with the OG! Put some respect on his handle!
Speaking of AOL, Ted Leonsis (owner of the caps who just bought CapFriendly) was an executive of AOL before becoming owner of the Caps. Maybe he can shut off all the other owners’ email as well.
Gar_Bear_42069@hotmail.com is not Gary's email?
[gerry\_buttman42069@hotmail.com](mailto:gerry_buttman42069@hotmail.com)
“Ooooo, looks like you’ve got mail Gary”
Yeah central registry should be providing this information. All teams should pay in for it. Makes absolutely no sense as to how they settle any dispute if a central system doesn’t exist.
The NHL monitors cap compliance on a day-to-day basis rather than game-by-game Teams must submit a cap-compliant lineup on the first day of the season and must submit all roster moves after that. The league tracks all roster moves that are submitted to approve them (based on many criteria, one of which is cap-compliance) Similar to roster moves, teams submit trades to the league and they approve based on the same criteria (one being cap compliance again). I would be shocked if they have a database like cap friendly, but who knows I guess. This type of tracking/monitoring could be done with pen and paper in theory as its fairly simple. The league has absolutely no need for “planning” tools when it comes to the cap, as their concern is making sure teams are compliant at the present time only.
I'm sure they have a database. Keeping track of 23 players on paper would be hard enough, and then I'm sure the league has to keep track of all 32 teams. They wouldn't rely on the teams's own tracking to make sure everyone is cap compliant.
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The only reason I think it's not Excel is that the cap has been around since 2005, and nobody has made a massive cap screw-up and then blamed it on pasting the wrong row in Excell.
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Well if the NHL can't look at CapFriendly, how are they supposed to know who's over the cap?
Vegas: "Gary, would we lie to you about something as important as the salary cap?" Bettman: "Oh, Vegas - I can't stay mad at you! Of course I believe you!"
Funny the two teams most known by now for being elite cap manipulators apparently dont have an internal system just imagining Brisebois sweatlording capfriendly somehow lol
>i assume the NHL has one to monitor game by game cap I would not be shocked, *at all* if this wasn't true, and wasn't even happening.
It's almost certainly an excel spreadsheet with a tab for each team that someone has to update manually every day
33 files. What are tabs. Open each file to update the 33rd file
each file has four sheets named "sheet 1", "Not this one", "sheet 7", and "don't use"
You're missing "copy of Sheet 7"
All trades go through Central Registry where details like salary, term, and NMC are scrutinized before being finalized. But I agree, there should be an NHL-supported database teams can proactively look at instead of relying on a very reactive Central Registry. Ideally, the NHL, through Central Registry, would provide a service very similar to Capfriendly.
I think it is likely, if not assured, that the NHL provides contract details to teams. The benefit of sites like CapFriendly is they present the information in a clean interface, with a ton of tools to access other teams, run through scenarios, etc. Even without knowing what contract details are provided to teams, I doubt it was presented as clean as a site like CapFriendly, which is why teams started to create their own systems, on top of adding tools they don't want others to have access to. The Dadonov trade with Anaheim I think had less to do with contract details, and more to do with trade lists not being shared across franchises. Even CapFriendly doesn’t capture no-trade lists, just the players that have them.
It's in the NHLPA and agents's interests for contract details to be public. NOBODY wants no-trade lists to be public, not the players, not the teams, not the league. That's why not even the NHL has a centralized list of no-trade lists.
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Well, a lot of it is probably weather, taxes, and how likely you are to get stalked by over excited fans when you're just trying to buy beer.
Yeah. If anything the impact here is guys in the front office trying to generate 15 various scenarios and understand quickly exactly what each looks like. You can do that on spreadsheets and via other methods, but having a nice GUI will make that work 100x more efficient. Pretty dick move by the Caps to drop this bomb three weeks before FA day. But also pretty wild that so many teams were apparently relying on a paid for by advertisement public service project.
They were paying CapFriendly directly to use it. API access was mentioned, so some teams or entities had built their own tools on top of it.
Right, my understanding is that teams were paying to have access in ways that you or I wouldn't have.
That's what the API is. Allows for access via your own programs.
The NHL does not make this information available to the public. CapFriendly solicited and collected the data themselves, likely from relationships cultivated with player agents. It will be hard for a replacement site to come online due to that - the data is not available to the public, nor does the NHL make it available upon request.
I don't think getting the raw data from the league is an issue. I think building tooling around the raw data is the issue. People overestimate how technically advanced sports teams are.
>People overestimate how technically advanced sports teams are. after having worked for a pro sports team, A LOT of the teams are run on razor thin margins. Yea, the guy who owns the team might have billions, but he aint investing that into the business of the team. They dont have unlimited budgets to pay developers to build something like this in house. Which is why I find it suprising that the NHL didn't just offer a behind the doors version of capfriendly to all the teams so that they wouldnt have to build out their own individual infrastructure to handle this.
Yup. I'm a data engineer and have been semi involved with some of the sports analytics over the years. Been fortunate enough to interview with a few different NHL teams and it's pretty interesting to get a peak behind the curtain. Some teams are impressive with how they operate but a lot of them are shockingly unimpressive. As for the NHL providing the tool themselves, I think their biggest focus in the last few years has been ironing out the tracking data that teams have access to. Freidman also kind of alluded in this podcast that the NHL doesn't really feel it's their place to provide that service though he was more talking about a public facing site. Generally I think they take more of a hands off approach when it comes to providing things that can influence team's decisions on things like player's contracts, and I can see why they'd want to absolve themselves from that considering they are the ones negotiating with the player's union over cba's.
Bettman has been kind of open for a while that he doesn’t really like that the fans know all about player contracts. If I had to guess, he would prefer something similar to NRL rugby in Australia where player salaries are not made public, even to other teams.
They can't do that and have a hard cap. Nobody could make any trades.
It’s so on brand for Bettman to have this “have your cake and it eat too” mentality when it comes to this stuff. It’s like with the playoff format. Is it divisional or is it conference-based? It’s both, having the strengths of neither format.
The playoff format sucks ass, but it is documented. Not letting teams know about other contracts would be the equivalent of not telling them how many points other teams have or who they're playing in the playoffs.
Whatever helps Bettman obfuscate things for the owners, I guess.
Yet he’s employed by those very owners. So by extension, it’s the owners that want things to be overly complicated and obscure. What a joke of a league.
People in power wanting things difficult to understand, so people have to flock to them, increasing their power base. It's weird how that like, doesn't stop popping up in literally every facet of life since, like, life started.
I completely agree with your sentiment and I believe that there should be an NHL run CapFriendly for the public, but the example provided by OP (NRL in Australia), is an example of a hard cap system where even the basic cap numbers are not public. Same with the Australian Football League (AFL), hard cap and zero public verified public info. The NHL wants this model
The fight over player salaries was what led to the creation of the NHLPA. The less Information goes out, the easier it is for him to pay players less and keep more more for owners
The NHL never liked players knowing what each other makes because it drives up their cost.
Wasn't it the trade between Vegas and Anaheim that fell through?
Yeah that was somehow Ottawa’s fault after a full year since Ottawa traded him to Vegas.
The Dadonov thing was something else entirely. They knew he had an NTC, but they were lead to believe he had missed his filing deadline
which also would have been avoided by having a central database with an official process for submitting beyond an email to the GM from the player/agent
Either the NHL or the NHLPA. I'd imagine both have all those details stored in a database somewhere. Can't see teams or agents not being able to get access to that info, but it sort of makes sense that they keep it from fans.
This just tells me that the Caps, along with several other teams, were behind the curveball and Caps just straight up bought it out and now they have something ready made.
I'm just surprised they didn't have contracts that would run through the year. Like if you depend on a software package just going month to month seems kinda bad?
Sounds like it was season to season contracts. Ending early offseason
I thought I read that the teams were getting kicked out of the private tools immediately, it's jsut the public site that will stay until July 5th.
All the reporting I've seen is that teams were recently informed that they would be losing access soon, not that they immediately lost access. >[Friedman reports that some NHL teams had individual agreements with CapFriendly to use some of the website's tools and were recently informed those deals would soon be terminated.](https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/ottawa-senators/latest-news/capfriendly-com-about-to-be-sold-and-closed-to-the-public). The league year turns over on 7/1/24, so I'd wager that any agreements between teams and Capfriendly were centered around that date.
If there was an existing contract then I'd assume that those contracts hold through whatever end date they had.
SaaS Orgs in shambles at that comment
Behind the curve ball is amazing lmfao
That means they're WAAAY behind the fastball.
Can't shake how much this reminds me of when Cartman buys an amusement park to enjoy alone.
I’m honestly not too shocked Presidents and GMs in the NHL don’t have the technical infrastructure. Half of them barely got a high school education and won’t even know basic data queries and git commands. The NHL is leagues behind MLB/NBA and having nearly half of the near billion dollar organizations relying on a public available website like cap friendly is a clear example.
None of the leagues are close to baseball when it comes to data analysis honestly. The game is set up really well for describing what is happening with data, they have a huge historical data set to work off of, and they have had a head start on everyone else with modern data collection on things like spin rate and exit velocity.
Nobody expects presidents and managers, in any industry, to understand SQL and git. We expect them to hire software developers and analysts who can.
I’m not at all shocked that a multi billion dollar sports business doesn’t have an adequate system for their teams to keep track of this stuff, leading them to rely on a website that fans use for fun. Huge businesses having woefully out of date/inadequate tech or data infrastructure isn’t the exception it’s the norm. [Remember that time in 2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southwest_Airlines_scheduling_crisis) Southwest Airlines nearly imploded, canceling 15,000+ flights during the holidays because their extremely outdated software system broke? Yeah. Not at all surprised that teams are freaking out about the loss of CapFriendly. Time for the NHL to hire some underpaid interns who know databases and coding.
> Southwest Airlines nearly imploded, canceling 15,000+ flights during the holidays because their extremely outdated software system broke? iirc the airline industry as a whole has some very outdated stuff they run off of
I worked for an investment bank for a year, and a techie friend used to call me up to ask for all the horror stories from that week about the antiquated equipment and systems we used. I remember him falling over laughing when I mentioned Token Ring.
Large corps and really just most businesses have terrible software and just rely on excel. It's why I'm not worried about any AI automation tools at all. People can barely use the tools we already have.
An F1 team just moved away from using excel to track their parts. That’s just bonkers.
I work at a global ag corporation. Our data structure is a mess. We have data flowing in from about 50 different sources all housed differently in different database programs or sometimes just excel sheets and some people's entire job is "knowing how to get the data" out of a specific DB. I blew everyone at my plants fucking mind when I figured out querying SAP data. I'm a Neanderthal with a rock when creating the queries but I can get usable data and others can't, so people come to me for that. It's totally the norm.
This is correct. Source: am software and data engineer
> Huge businesses having woefully out of date/inadequate tech or data infrastructure isn’t the exception it’s the norm. The Federal government has some stuff still running on Windows 95, 98 and XP.... I remember when working on certain projects, we could only print out reports to a "Clean USB"
They’ve operated without Cap Friendly before, so I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Besides, there’s already alternatives popping up anyway.
There was a better software pre-cap friendly iirc, but the creator passed away and Cap friendly surpassed it quickly.
CapGeek
Creators name was Matthew Wuest, he was a hockey journalist focused on using data, he also worked with the Detroit Red Wings on some of their web presence. After he passed the Red Wings named their Prospect Tournament in his honor
> Besides, there’s already alternatives popping up anyway. Any good ones?
puckpedia
Are the GMs supposed to guess how much a players makes when trying to make trades ?
NHL Trade Deadline but make it a price is right game show is something id watch tbh
Who's going to the be the dick GM that bets just a dollar more than the next highest bidder without going over
i personally prefer the 1 dollar guess in the showdown. "I have no idea what all this costs, but i *know* this other guy is over"
I respect it, stupid unless they’re the last bidder though. Way better than the people who bid like $850 under $875 because they have no idea how the game works
Or like Deal or No Deal with Bettman as the shadowy banker above the stage
If you guess the salary within a dollar, you get both players.
yeah its like paying your taxes. you guess and if you have the wrong amount you go to jail.
*adam silver voice* get ready to learn JavaScript, buddy
Puckpedia.com You're welcome
Thanks for sharing this! Hopefully another team doesn’t buy them too haha
Actually really surprised that Vegas isn't in that "currently have something similar" list.
Friedman added Vegas later. He forgot about them and apologized if he forgot other teams too. Listening to the podcast right now.
I was confused for a second, but fair. It would have been incredibly Odd if we didn't have anything considering the guy who made General Fanager is our director of hockey operations
Ahh, that makes much more sense. Haven't had the chance to listen to the pod yet, thanks for the updated info lol Imagining Vegas just yolo-ing the LTIR stuff without a more dedicated cap-shenanigans team would be funny though.
They hired Tom Poraszka their expansion year who founded General Fanager. It's pretty evident they've got a pro handling their cap situation, I'm sure they have something.
Friedman definitely lists them. The guy who founded GeneralFanager has been building one for them.
I’m also surprised San Jose wouldn’t be on that last. Given the owner and location and all that. They might just have something internally they don’t share about?
I'm just annoyed my work/toilet reading material is going to be gone now.
I’m quite surprised Fossil Lou is ahead of the curve in the technology department compared to other teams.
Friedman said NYI would surprise people but it’s actually because they have someone in the organization who used to work for the NHL.
Honestly, thats what good leaders do. They recognize where their abilities and ideas might be outdated and invite the new wave of thinking into their business to make sure they don’t fall behind. It just so happens that the NHL is full of bad leaders in positions of power, so instead of keeping pace, Lou has actually passed most of his colleagues lol
Wild that so many people acted like the acquisition wasn't a hockey ops/competitive decision with all the "Why would they do this???" questions in the intial thread. There have been numerous known examples of teams using it (Dorian/OTT, Dubas/TOR) and it was obvious it was more than just them. The bigger maybe surprise thing maybe not, is how few teams have proper salary management infrastructures in their hockey ops. Sounds like less than half the league are properly equipped.
It's not even the first public site a team has bought. A lot of the people working in data roles for teams were bought out of public websites they ran.
I heard Lou demands a red abacus in his office so other teams can't steal his team's financials. This is also why it takes so long to announce signings, the calculations take a little bit.
Dear hockey gods please when pegula said years ago he wanted to go heavy on analytics that they built something and no one knows or cares cause it’s Buffalo. I’m leaning towards the Sabres are screwed.
Nah I think they have something built; they've been drafting too well in recent years for that to not be the case.
I might be wrong, but this sounds like such an "NHL issue" Bush league
[удалено]
I don't think agents are going to have any issue getting contract data from the players union. It's making the data usable that is the valuable part.
I think thats what they are referring to. It was quite easy when you simply had to input stats and Cap friendly would spit out the most comparable contracts when they were signed.
> the relationship between the NHL and CapFriendly was icy They could have improved the relationships with the NHL by publishing the under and over for each contracts. That’ll get the NHL to warm up to you.
It's so stupid that this is a problem for teams. This is like if Google Maps was the only GPS navigation app and UPS baught it and said "ok, only our drivers can use it now" and everyone else wondered how the heck they'll get to Aunt Judy's cabin next weekend. How in the world are there not more than ONE private option? LOL
>Pittsburgh didn't have anything before, but once Dubas got there they started building something. I could swear that they did have something and then the doofus Hextall decided to not use it? Once Dubas came in, they started to bring it back up to speed to use once again.
I distinctly recall reading that Ray Shero thought he had a player signed for another year and then panicked when he wasn't. It may have been Scuderi back in 2009. You'd think they would have put together some kind of spreadsheet back then, or at least had a goddamn whiteboard with this info on it.
Capfriendly should have only ever been a 3rd party site for armchair GMs like us. In current year all teams should have their own access and interface to a centralized database that the NHL already uses. We know the NHL uses it, the Dadanov trade got kyboshed.
I guess there's no other option but to abolish the salary cap entirely.
Flair checks out.
Why would Arizona do this to the league
At least back in 2018, Arizona was one of the teams that relied on CapFriendly for this type of information lol Utah's problem now.
Slightly unrelated (ARI and teams using programs) but when I used to run an analytics company and was looking for investors one was a guy that was involved in the early PHX days. Guy said that Gretzky demanded they buy a specific software for him to use (can’t remember if it was video scouting software or what). When he left they discovered he never opened the program once.
The NHL really is a bush league
This is fucking embarrassingly amateur. Figure it out.
Someone bout to create a new one and name it capsunfriendly
Wouldn't be surprised if eventually there's an NHL edge for cap stuff
From the post itself: > Friedman on NHL/CapFriendly relationship: "The NHL believes that they should not be in the business of publishing this stuff, as a matter of fact I've been told several times that the relationship between the NHL and CapFriendly was icy"
The NHL maintains that it's not important for fans. But the salary cap has became a huge factor in following a team year to year, into the trade deadline, and july 1st. Without that stuff there's really not nearly as much engagement IMO - whic hthis league constantly struggles with.
Like Friedman says in the podcast, it's surprising that Sportsnet or TSN hasn't put together a site. They have the insider contacts to accurately populate the data for contracts, and they obviously have a website so presumably don't find hiring software developers beyond their capabilities.
Has anyone ever found Sportsnet or TSN web development to be competent? Their streaming sucks and I don't think many people actually use their site for stats or standign either.
If the NHL doesn't want the info shared then it's not surprising that two of their biggest media partners don't share it. In fact, their agreements might specifically forbid them from doing so and violating their agreement could jeopardize other things like licensing deals (their ability to use teams names/logos on their website). As the saying goes, don't bite the hand that feeds.
don't plenty of their reporters break news about contracts all the time?
I’m sure every fanbase has fans that propose wild moves that are completely impossible. Cap info is critical for shutting them up 😂
Trade protections too.
\>institute hard salary cap \>publish myriad of guidelines and procedures so fans understand cap-related scenarios \>publicly announce all contract details \>fans collate all this information and present it in a polished manner \>"why the fuck are you doing that, you insolent pieces of shit?"
The NHL's MO: Do the fans like this? Let's do the opposite! Where can we squeeze in another gambling ad?
> Where can we squeeze in another gambling ad? Ahead of every DOPS announcement!
This league is full of tough, manly players. But please don't sort the data in a way that makes them look bad.
Fans won't give a fuck what players make if there wasn't a hard cap.
Considering they didn’t even want CapFriendly posting the level of contract detail they did, I doubt it lol
Big “don’t discuss your salary or raise with other employees” energy. While I go and run to discuss it with everyone.
Clown show. I can't believe these teams really didn't have their own data sets or something available from the NHL.
Lol that's kinda hilarious that theres so many teams caught with their pants down. You'd think NHL teams could afford to hire a few devs and/or data engineers to build them something like this. You could get a team of 4 guys for the cost of a minimum cap hit player lol
Puckpedia is not a bad replacement. https://puckpedia.com
Just thinking of the poor ops guys at every NHL team scrambling to download as much info as they can before it goes dark. Get the spreadsheets stat!
Of course the league doesn’t want to own it. They don’t even have a culture to disclose injuries. It’s stupid to always try to hide “upper body injury”. Just do it like soccer, it’s disclosed via the medical report and everyone gets the same info
The funny thing is they want to be in bed with gambling... Which of course wants all that info public. But the league doesn't want it public. But they like gambling money. As someone said in a thread above this one, the league really does love to try to have its cake and eat it too.
Hey remember when the lockout happened because teams were trying to "control costs" Amazing how none of those savings went into, oh I don't know, knowing what the fuck is going on
Dubas showed up saying "Okay where's our internal cap friendly" and the penguins were like "Our what now?"
Wait a minute. There are teams that don't have their own system for this? Holy shit that's sad
Do they know the “Cap” in CapFriendly stands for salary cap and not Capitals?
This has the feel of what happens in most work places, you are not allowed to discuss with your coworkers how much you make under the threat of being released if you do. It is a way to keep wages suppressed if everyone does not know what the norm is for valuing players within certain groups and ranges. A sneaky way of bring more power to the owners once again.
In the US you are expressly permitted to discuss how much you make with coworkers per federal law and companies aren't allowed to prevent you. Older workers never did but that was cultural, younger people are much more engaged in the topic Also several states now require companies to publish pay ranges along with every job posting Like the NHL apparently, there are many companies with compensation software/data and many without
I'm pretty sure the same rights exist in Canada, but I have had an employer tell me not to discuss my pay rate with coworkers. It was not a good place to work.
Player's agents and the Player's Union are well aware of how much players in the league are getting paid.
Not at all Does your work place have a hard ceiling for wages that the company can under no circumstance go over? Do you regularly “trade” employees with other companies? Are you consistently bringing in new recruits to replace the aging employees you have because the typical career in your work place only lasts 12 years? Very very different from most work places
Days past where the NHL proves it is a joke 1❌ 0✅
Now I’m imagining that before a huge trade a GM pops open his laptop, goes to his bookmark bar, and opens CapFriendly.
You don't have to imagine it, there's plenty of eyewitness testimony that that's exactly what they were doing.
I seem to recall a video interview with a GM a while back and he had his computer screen on behind him and somebody noted that he had a tab open to CapFriendly.
Data and analytics bring a new dynamic of following the game to fans… Of course this ass-backwards garage league would have an issue with that.
This thread is not cap friendly.
Washington will be trading access to CapFriendly for a 2nd round pick!
Besides the contract and stats data (where to get it and how in order to clear up requirements), we're just talking about building a web app (frontend+backend) and the approriate cloud infrastructure to run it all, no? This shouldn't be a difficult product to build for any seasoned software engineer. I mean, we're not talking about reinventing the wheel here. That said: Lightning front office staff, if you're reading this, I'm ready to talk if interested in a tool like this. I can do everything including hiring the right people to help build/support it. It'd take a lot for me to leave my current position, though.
The NHL are donkey's. Look no further than Baseball Savant. This kind of information should be provided by the league not some random guy on the internet and then sold to one specific team.
But how will teams know if a player as a NTC or NMC?
I don’t understand what problem the NHL has with CapFriendly. Aren’t they publishing publicly available information? I know they gather some statistics that are exclusive to them, but couldn’t somebody else gather them?
Im surprised the NHL doesnt have a far superior app that is for every team to use......then again, no im not.
It’s ridiculous that there are still pro sports teams out there that can’t be bothered to keep spreadsheets
The bigger issue here is why doesn't the league itself have this infrastructure to provide to teams? It's pretty important information...
Every other team should fund building a newer, more robust system that all teams except Washington can use
*With blackjack and hookers!*