Why did the Washington Capitals purchase CapFriendly?

Trying to make sense of what happened with the website that will go dark next month.

News broke on Sunday that the Washington Capitals are buying and effectively shuttering CapFriendly.

The transaction won’t be official until early July, which means the website which tracks and publicly presents NHL contract information has roughly four weeks before it goes dark.

Why did Washington make the purchase?

That’s one of the biggest thoughts I had after Elliotte Friedman first broke the news. I’d always assumed everything CapFriendly has was just a public database on information that teams already had internally.

So I texted with a couple NHL front office members and asked that very question. Of the teams I connected with, all of them told me that Washington buying CapFriendly wouldn’t impact them.

As one exec put it, their team already has an internal process tracking all contracts, cap hits, and scenarios for all 32 NHL teams. The NHL also provides all of this information to all 32 teams.

Another team executive told me, “for us it would be a useless purchase, we already have all that data internally and presented cleanly, and I would think most teams already did anyway.”

The Capitals already had their own internal system and in-house capologist, it wasn’t like buying CapFriendly solved a glaring need.

It turns out the purchase is more about hiring the team behind CapFriendly and streamlining internal operations, with CapFriendly’s infrastructure being folded into other tools that Washington has behind closed doors.

The website had to be shuttered because NHL and team employees are forbidden from sharing confidential league information. So even if Washington wanted to keep the site operational as a public-facing service, it wouldn’t be allowed to.

Think about it as the outsiders, who did a great job, are now getting to work on the inside with full data at their fingertips.

For the rest of us, PuckPedia is now the most established NHL salary cap website on the market.