The Washington Capitals shocked the National Hockey League and its fanbase on Sunday with the purchase of CapFriendly, a popular website used to track salary cap information and transactions across the league.
Washington's new acquisition has raised questions, as well as critiques, with the site set to be publicly shut down as soon as July 5.
When it comes to the reason behind the purchase, Jeff Marek and Elliotte Friedman explained on 32 Thoughts that it was motivated by internal purposes moreso than profitting off of it.
"It sounds like something as simple as they want something like this for internal purposes and instead of hiring a bunch of people and spending time and resources to build one and then waiting for it essentially upward of two years you could just spend the same money and buy CapFriendly," Marek said.
"Not only are the Capitals purchasing the tools, but also the infrastructure," Friedman added. "They're not only getting that infrastructure, they're getting new employees who can run it internally."
But why can't the site stay open to the public?
Friedman explained that Washington couldn't keep it up even if it wanted to.
"The NHL frowns on the existence of sites like this one, even though they should be doing it themselves," Friedman added. "They consider it propriety information, so the Capitals couldn't keep it open if they wanted to... the league would say you cannot be partner to this and have it be public, and also, you couldn't make any money from it on any ads. So once the Capitals purchased it, it was coming down."
As a result, there are some teams now left to find a way to keep track of league salary cap information, while others have alternatives or have alternatives ready to go. Still, Washington's purchase has, without a doubt, caused a stir.
"There are some teams scrambling today, no question about it," Friedman said. "There are a couple of people who said to me there will be some teams that don't have this kind of infrastructure that will be like, 'Oh no, we're in trouble here.'"
There are alternatives, though, like PuckPedia and Sportrac, that will be receiving more attention going forward.
