It is no secret that CapFriendly is now down, and will be for good. When you visit the site, all you see is the following message,
After 9 years of late nights, early mornings, missed holidays and family events while diligently updating the website and developing tools, the CapFriendly team has made the decision to begin a new chapter and challenge!
We couldn’t be more thankful for the support and interest in CapFriendly our fans have shown over the years.
We’d also like to give a special thank you to:
Guillaume Lambert-Heon (French Translations)
Tim Hiebert (Depth Charts)
CapFriendly Forum moderators
Evolving-Hockey
Sportsnet
Sports Interaction
Elite Prospects
Jason Bukala and The Pro Hockey Group
Steve Dangle, Adam Wylde, and Jesse Blake of SDPN
The Daily Faceoff and Frank Seravalli
Those who reached out to assist us with suggestions and corrections
Sincerely,
The CapFriendly Team
But don’t fret. There is a new guy on the block, and that new guy has been there since June 2018. That new guy is PuckPedia.
What is PuckPedia you ask?
How Did it All Start?
But we dug deeper than simply looking at their About page, we interviewed the website’s founder, Hart Levine. Just like the rest of us, Levine was a hockey fan and he grew up playing the game in Edmonton.
“I’m a huge hockey fan,” Levine told us, “I played growing up and it’s always been my favourite sport. I wanted to do something in the hockey world, and I was always very interested in the salary cap, contracts, agents, etc” Levine went to school for accounting, which makes a lot of sense when you think of the data he is presenting to hockey fans.
In 2018 there were already several predominate sites in the hockey information game. If you wanted contract or cap details, you went to CapFriendly, if you wanted stats, you went to Hockey-Reference, or if you needed an overview of a player’s career it is wonderfully shown on HockeyDB. But what if you wanted all the information in one place? That is what Levine wanted, and he wanted it to be presented in an easy-to-approach way.
“At the time, my friends would ask me questions about the salary cap, contracts, team cap situations, etc, and when I’d refer them to the existing sites with that information, they said that the sites were too complicated and hard to understand. That gave me the idea to make the site”
Levine hopes one day that PuckPedia will give fans all the tools and models that an NHL front office has available privately. PuckPedia has several tools, and the website is well on its way to achieving that goal.
“[PuckPedia is] not just a place to see it [information], but a place for people to use it and engage with it. That’s why we have features like the PuckGM interactive roster suite, the Pick Value & Cap Relief Calculator, and much more coming.”
The Perri Calculators
“I’m really proud of the PuckPedia Perri Pick Value Calculator and PuckPedia Perri Cap Relief Calculator; these are the same types of tools that NHL teams use, so it really gives fans a chance to be in the GM role.”
The Perri Pick Value Calculator is a tool created by Matt Perri, former Director of Hockey Analytics for the Arizona Coyotes. Essentially, this tool allows you to compare the values of draft picks by assigning a point value to a draft pick and directly comparing it to others. This is the example in their great blog post about how the tool works and was created. I strongly recommend you read it here.
The Perri Cap Relief Calculator uses the data from the Perri Pick Value Calculator to help assign a draft pick value on trading to obtain cap space. The tool is very dynamic. You assign a team and the player that is being moved and it tells you how much that cap space is worth. However, you can also use various sliders to manipulate the specifics of the money to help get an idea of what compensation a third team may get while taking on salary to broker a deal.
For example, let’s say that the Canucks decide they want to move on from Tyler Myers at the halfway mark of next season and are willing to retain $1M of the deal, this tool estimates it would cost the 33rd overall pick (the first pick in the second round). That would be what the Canucks should expect in return for the $1M in cap space, or what a third party would be expected to receive to take on $1M for the next three seasons. You can read more about that tool here.
PuckGM and Puckdoku
The third major tool on the website is PuckGM, which is an interactive roster tool that allows users to have an entire roster in front of them and play around with making salary-compliant teams.
“The new PuckGM interactive roster suite is really exciting, and fans have really enjoyed it since it recently launched. There are a lot more features coming for that.”
With this tool, you can trade picks and players, sign RFAs and UFAs, buy players out, and even send them to the minors or place them on LTIR. It is a very dynamic tool that allows anyone to try and build a competitive team just like a real front office would.
PuckGM is currently led by Taylor Dixon. You may recognize Dixon’s name is he is the founder of the popular Puckdoku which is a partner of PuckPedia.
“Puckdoku was created and founded by Taylor Dixon last summer. I came across it when it launched, and I was super impressed and hooked on it. I quickly connected with Taylor and became a partner in it. Over that time, Taylor started getting involved in PuckPedia, and he’s now a big part of the PuckPedia team”
All The Other Features
But the tools are far from the only thing that separates PuckPedia from the crowd. The sheer amount of data and information they have and how you can consume it is probably the website’s biggest success.
“There are also little things that are unique to PuckPedia: our career stats show what contract the player was on in the season he had those stats, our contract tables show what seasons are UFA seasons, and our Draft results pages show the Entry Level Deals that each player has signed.”
There is also lots of agent information available on PuckPedia. “I’ve always been really interested in the role agents play and the relationships between agents and teams. PuckPedia shows each player’s agent, the agent’s full client list, and the agent leaderboard ranks the agents by the contracts they manage”
Glancing at the agent list, you can see Pat Brisson has the largest total value with $1.366B spread over 80 contracts. PuckPedia even goes as far as to tell you that he has a total cap hit of $248.12M.
PuckPedia is an extremely powerful tool and it’s still growing and getting better. When I asked Levine what plans he had coming up he said: “More functionality on PuckGM, additional interactive tools on PuckPedia, some layout updates, and lots more.”
PuckPedia, like CapFriendly has done business with NHL teams according to Levine on Sekeres and Price.
StadiumChinatown.ca even uses one of PuckPedia tools, the PuckPedia Connector. This is a tool of theirs that we have built into our website that automatically takes a player or team name and turns it into a link to a relevant page on PuckPedia for readers to get more information on the given player. See look;
Loui Eriksson
See, everything you could ever want to know about Little Things Loui is right there for you If you want it.
PuckPedia is well on its way to being the one-stop shop every hockey fan should always have in an open tab. While it’s sad that CapFriendly is gone, all eyes are on PuckPedia to fill the void and they are doing a great job at it.