The Washington Capitals made a move last week that was largely unpopular among NHL fans.
The Capitals announced they were purchasing the salary cap website CapFriendly and onboarding three of the site’s management team to the Capitals’ management group. The site is scheduled to be taken down for public use in early July.
Capitals general manager Brian MacLellan provided his first public statement on the move last week but recently sat down with Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli on the Frankly Speaking Podcast to deliver more of the rationale behind the deal.
“We’ve ended up using CapFriendly quite a bit internally,” MacLellan said. “We have our own system, so at some point we got to an internal discussion of, ‘What would happen to us if CapFriendly went away?’ We’ve had this discussion over the last couple of seasons, and during the last season, we got in contact with CapFriendly, talked to their guys trying to educate ourselves on whether we could put the time and resources into it, and eventually discussion got around to maybe it makes for sense for us to purchase CapFriendly and hire the people involved.
“The discussion lasted probably for over a year and then we ended up coming to an agreement with those guys. I think the other important point is that we wanted to build off that interface and we needed someone that could do that and they have great experience doing it. We have a relationship with a couple of these guys now so we think we can build off that, incorporate some of our analytics stuff, and build a pretty good interface that we can use going forward.”
The Capitals announced they would be bringing brothers Jamie, Ryan, and Christopher Davis in from the website to their own internal team. Jamie Davis, the highest up of the three with CapFriendly, has no prior NHL job experience and is still listed as Vice President and Full Stack Developer of CapFriendly on his LinkedIn page.
“Those guys are passionate about what they do obviously because the energy and effort they put into that website,” MacLellan said. “We feel good about having them on our staff plus they know the league, they know the players, they know the CBA. It’s invaluable in our mind. We’re pretty happy we got to acquire them.”
The group moves to Washington after a period where their relationship with the NHL was reportedly “icy.” The league considers the information that was provided through the site proprietary and wasn’t a fan of the public being able to access the data.
With the site being shuttered for public use in a period of weeks, the Capitals’ purchase could impact a majority of the league’s teams. The sale reportedly left some NHL clubs without any internal infrastructure of their own “scrambling.”
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman listed just nine out of the NHL’s 32 teams when expressing his knowledge of clubs that have internal salary cap infrastructure and could survive without CapFriendly. The count leaves about 70 percent of the teams without a present alternative, perhaps explaining MacLellan’s interview with Seravalli, the PHWA president.
