Seems like they should change the name to CapsUnfriendly.

Honestly the owners of CF are vile too. They stole the entire website and layout from CapGeek's founder Mathew Wuest and are now selling it. And I doubt a single dollar will go to his family and estate.

LETS GOOOOOOOOO

My thoughts exactly. CapFriendly is great but if a 100 million dollar a year operation WITH FULL ACCESS to all the league data needs this site then holy crap they must've **** the bed in that department over the past decade

Fax machine jammed again…so they purchased a website.

Longtime lurker (as you can tell from the join date), but huge fan of CF, really disappointed in this sale, both from CF and the Caps. This is a resource we need, it made the NHL more transparent (well, CapGeek did, and CF continued that), and it helped a lot of us keep tabs on transactions, waivers, etc. Really sad it's being shut down because of one team's greed.

What about personal info?

capgeek went belly up, and now capfriendly? damn the washington capitals. i hope ovie doesnt break the records. not sure how this helps them- keeping away info from your competitors that should be common knowledge for every team already.

**** washington, **** ovie.

damn, and to think how much traffic i sent their way over the years.

Been here for 6 years, this site really educated me about sports management from a financial perspective. Love making isles post discussing it with the other users due to not having friends who are into hockey. Capfriendly good for getting compensated, thanks for the memories and F***K the CAPS.

This sucks. I love being on this site. I am practically speechless. I hope the site owners are happy bc most of us loyal followers are being shafted here.

Don't post much anymore but I still used the capfriendly resources for a multitude of things.
Real bummer. But can't blame anyone involved in the sale. It's a business after all.
Surely there will be something like Capfriendly, but it will never be the same.

What's the best alternative? Not that anything comes close.

I love you all except for that one guy who seems to always be online and replies to my trade proposal threads within less than 5 minutes in an unneeded and insulting way.

I sincerely hope he finds the love he needs.

The rest of you, let's all go meet over at alt.sports.hockey.

i took a poke-around on PuckPedia just now, and, uh... let's just say there are some very basic and obvious problems that need to be rectified pretty quickly if they want to be anything near what CF's been for the last 8 years. (things like literally making up prospects, or having one player link to another player's page, for some reason.)

not that i believe they can't fix their problems. they'll just need to get their house in order very quickly.

I think the NHL should step in here and block this sale. The Caps are creating a competitive advantage against other teams in the league. If they created their own site to track this stuff that would be fine. But to buy a public website to create an advantage and screw over the NHL fans is quite another.

I could understand an entity buying it if they believed they could better leverage it as a profitable business or to raise their profile.
All the media outlets, teams, fans, etc., use this site. If ESPN or Fanatics, someone along those lines wanted it, I'd understand. The only benefit I can see to a single NHL team owning it, is that it takes power away from others who use it as a reference.
Hell, the NHL or NHLPA would make more sense as an owner of the site.
You want to laud transparency and engage the public in a meaningful way, you have a tool to do so. Maybe better information from the source will help minimize the criticisms around teams leveraging IR and you can provide better explanations with visual representation to educate your fanbase on the various machinations of the CBA.

The NHL not stepping up and the Capitals organization purchasing a site intended to be a public tool only to internalize it, are both bad for the league and public education.

I appreciate what we had, but until there is a owner of a cap site who is more concerned with freedom of information than financial compensation, this will be the eventually fate of any such site once they reach a certain level of market penetration.

Peace to all and may the Capitals suffer a 50 year Stanley Cup drought for this questionable and ultimately harmful acquisition.

I highly doubt that the Capitals are buying this website only to track cap. There have been a few different websites like this that have closed, and something new always pops up that at the very least provides tracking of contracts.

Either, the Capitals wanted to hire the people behind this website but the website was too profitable for them to leave - Or there is proprietary software or tools that this website owns that are of use. There is no way they would just buy it to track contracts.

The NHL should have bought the site, not because the Capitals buying it provides them with an unfair competitive advantage, but because they need a legitimate database for this stuff and it seems like it would make more sense to buy a proven brand with a track record of doing a great job and work with them to make the website even better for fans and more useful internally for teams.

Fans are always looking for different ways to connect with the game, and hockey tends to have a very steep learning curve for the on ice stuff compared to other sports. I think that's why there are so many subcultures online that fans gravitate to, whether it be the cap side of things, advanced stats, or even things like goes who go to Icethetics and talk about jerseys. A major competitive disadvantage that the NHL has compared to other sports is that most people simply don't get the opportunity to play hockey growing up compared to other sports like soccer or basketball - and the game itself is seemingly more random with a steeper learning curve. So for fans who want to engage in it, this website would have had a ton of marketing potential to engage fans with things like the Armchair GM, trade machine, etc.

I will miss you boys, it’s been a lot if fun denying Brady trades 😭😭

y'see... that assumes that the NHL has the best interests of its fans in mind.

we know this to not be the case. Gary Bettman has literally said that the NHL doesn't have this kind of website because fans don't care about this kind of stuff. the NHL FO cares not a whit about improving the fan experience in this manner. they already track everything internally through NHL Central Registry.

if anything, it's not in the interest of the NHL FO or team FOs to reveal this information to fans, because then they can continue to hide behind sad and pathetic excuses for not doing better, or whining about how "the salary cap makes our job too hard." moreover, making this public repository of player salary data inaccessible ends up taking power away from players and their agents and the NHLPA, in terms of trying to negotiate better contracts, and team owners will take any opportunity they can get to funnel more money into their pockets.

I don't know why you think the NHL has the authority to do that.

they own the caps

Bc the Capitals are a part of the NHL. This is a public company that is now being used expressly by the Caps. If the Caps see value in a site like this they should create one but to buy this site that services NHL fans and connects them to the game itself just is bad for business. I also got to believe that NHL GMs of all the other teams are going to raise some issues about this. Bc now in order to have this same advantage they will have to shed out the money to create this. If other NHL teams have to do this then so should the Caps.

So I guess everybody that bought premium packages are getting refunded?

Oh yes - the amount of procrastination I've done on this webpage is monstrous since 2017.