The Washington Capitals’ first move of the offseason didn’t involve any players or draft picks. The Capitals acquired the salary cap website CapFriendly and onboarded three of the site’s management team on June 12.
CapFriendly was used by fans, journalists, and a majority of the league’s teams to get the best, most accurate, and up-to-date contract/roster news. The site is scheduled to be taken down for public use in early July.
“I don’t think anybody’s happy,” MacLellan, who has seemingly spoken to the press more than a normal offseason, said Thursday. “The whole industry is not very happy about it. But I think something else will be created that takes its spot. It’s incentive for people to create it now that we’ve bought that one. I think there’ll be probably a couple of other opportunities, websites that do the same thing, so I don’t think it’ll be long for that to happen.”
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman previously 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.
MacLellan admitted last week that the Capitals went through with the purchase out of fear that they’d eventually be in the same position. Now, Washington is in the clear but the rest of the league is not pleased.
“We spent a lot of time on [the site],” MacLellan has since added. “I think I’m on it every day, or I was on it every day. I’ll still be on it now. It’s a valuable tool. We have a lot of respect for what they created. Our biggest fear was it was going to go away and we weren’t going to be able to use it.
“We looked into creating our own version of it and it’s not easy to do and it’s expensive and it’s time-consuming. All those conversations led to us purchasing it when we did. We can build off it. We have the people that created it, so we can build and we can hopefully become more efficient as an organization on salary cap decisions, CBA decisions, and then use it on our analytics side, too: create a format that works for us that way.”
As part of the deal, Washington is bringing in brothers Jamie, Ryan, and Christopher Davis from CapFriendly to the Capitals’ 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.
With how reportedly icy the relationship between CapFriendly and the NHL was before the Capitals’ purchase, questions will now arise about whether or not public alternatives will be able to be built with the same depth of information that CapFriendly provided.
The league considers contract information proprietary and would prefer to keep all data in-house.
