The Washington Capitals made a move last week that was largely unpopular with NHL fans.
The Capitals announced they would purchase salary cap website CapFriendly and add three members of the site’s management team to the Capitals’ management group. The site is scheduled to be removed for public use in early July.
Capitals general manager Brian MacLellan made 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 provide more insight into the logic behind the deal.
“We ended up using CapFriendly quite a bit internally,” MacLellan said. “We have our own system, so at some point we had an internal discussion about, ‘What would happen to us if CapFriendly disappeared?’ We’ve had this discussion for the last few seasons, and during the last season, we reached out to CapFriendly, talked to their guys trying to educate ourselves on whether we could dedicate time and resources to it, and finally the discussion started. Maybe it makes sense for us to buy CapFriendly and hire the people involved.
“The discussion lasted probably over a year and then we ended up reaching an agreement with those guys. I think the other important point is that we wanted to build on that interface and we needed someone who could do it and who had a lot of experience doing it. We have a relationship with a couple of these guys now, so we think we can take advantage of that, bring in some of our analytics stuff, and create a pretty good interface that we can use in the future.”
The Capitals announced they were bringing brothers Jamie, Ryan and Christopher Davis from the site to their own in-house team. Jamie Davis, the tallest of the three with CapFriendly, has no prior NHL work experience and is still listed as CapFriendly’s vice president and full-stack developer on his LinkedIn page.
“Those guys are passionate about what they do, obviously because of the energy and effort they put into that website,” MacLellan said. “We feel good to have them on our staff, plus they know the league, they know the players, they know the collective bargaining agreement. It is invaluable in our minds. We are very happy to have acquired them.”
The group is moving to Washington after a period in which their relationship with the NHL was reportedly “frosty.” The league considers the information provided through the site to be proprietary and did not like the public being able to access the data.
With the site set to close for public use within a period of weeks, the Capitals’ purchase could affect most teams in the league. The sale reportedly left some NHL clubs without any internal “fighting” infrastructure of their own.
Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet listed just nine of the 32 NHL teams in expressing his knowledge of clubs that have an internal salary cap infrastructure and could survive without CapFriendly. The recount leaves about 70 percent of teams without an alternative present, which perhaps explains MacLellan’s interview with Seravalli, the PHWA president.
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