References and resources for how to replace CapFriendly

The popular website has closed and now fans scramble to find new places to find information

The popular website CapFriendly recently went dark after being acquired by the Washington Capitals. It’s a development that many in the league are very happy about.

Elliotte Friedman talked about that the NHL’s reaction to the sale on in a recent episode of the 32 Thoughts Podcast.

“The NHL believes they should not be in the business of publishing this stuff,” Friedman said. “As a matter of fact, I have been told several times that the relationship between the NHL and CapFriendly was quite icy. It’s not only the league that feels that way, I’ve heard some teams are adamant about that too. They don’t feel that NHL.com should be in the business of publishing this kind of stuff.”

That attitude is a disappointing one to have in 2024. Ironically, it was the league and owners who pushed so hard for a salary cap, yet they prefer to not have the details widely broadcasted out for public consumption.

Unfortunately, the world has changed. The salary cap is the reason that Marc-Andre Fleury won the Vezina one week in 2021 and was traded for nothing the following week. The salary cap is why the Penguins took on Kevin Hayes (and got a second round pick for their troubles in doing so). It’s a big deal and as important an aspect to understand for interested parties as anything.

The genius of CapFriendly was the user friendly interface, and wide breadth of knowledge. They had detailed FAQ’s about all sorts of aspects of the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement. There was the Armchair GM feature where users could build fantasy teams complete with signings and their own proposed trades. They had message boards, rosters, premium offerings, scouting and very accurate and very timely contract information down to the specific clauses and splits of money and signing bonuses per year.

If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of system design and a deep dive into the inner-workings of this stuff, this information is well done.

It will be a big loss for fans interested, but it won’t be the first time. CapFriendly emerged from the shadow of defunct websites like General Fanager and the O.G to the space, Capgeek. CapFriendly is gone, but despite the NHL’s hopes, the fan interest in knowing financial particulars is not going anywhere.

Here’s some new pages to look at to scratch the itch of picking up where CapFriendly has left off.

PuckPedia: has many of the same features. It’s more difficult to move around and will take time to adapt, but for salary cap information across the league and player-level info, it’s got utility

Cap Wages: This layout will look very familiar to CapFriendly users, as it looks almost identical to the old website. However, it’s very bare bones and I’ve heard uses AI to scrape information, the accuracy and staying power of Cap Wages will be interesting to watch, but is worth tracking

Zombie CapFriendly: Thanks to internet archiving, nothing old really ever goes all the way away if someone tries to dig deep enough to find it. The downside of this is all future inputs of signings, trades and the like won’t be updated, but if you want to see the old features Danny Page helps:

if you’re nostalgic for CapFriendy, need to double check some data, or just want to relive some of your Armchair GM teams, I’ve created a WARC archive on the Internet Archive that crawled the site shortly before the shut down.

The important files:

capfriendly-full-crawl-2024-07-05.warc.gz - This is 44GB and contains all the forums. If it wasn’t captured here, it’s not going to be in any other archive. Crawled from July 5th to July 8th. (Over 2.5M web requests!)

capfriendly-short-crawl-no-forums-2024-07-09.warc.gz - This is 775MB and Is very lightweight. It has the teams and most of the players, but may be missing some data. I captured this on July 9th, right before the shutdown.

capfriendly-short-crawl-no-forums-2024-07-03.warc.gz - Crawled July 3rd after the free agent rush, and is 3GB.

In order to view these files like the Wayback Machine, there are a few options:

Replay Webpage - Useful for the lightweight crawls: It is totally in-browser. Download the file, load it into the page, and then navigate to https://www.capfriendly.com when prompted.

pywb - Python library for capturing and serving archives. This is the ideal setup for researchers (or cough teams) - Download the 3 archives and run this as a server. To do that:

Twitter: @NHL_Rosters: The folks that did the depth charts are promising to re-launch somewhere soon, which will be worth following. They did a great job of updating all the injuries, recalls and keeping info current which makes it a wonderful resource if you have interest across the league.