As Bruins president Cam Neely sat at a podium last week explaining the hiring of Don Sweeney as the new Boston GM, he referenced conversations he had had with candidates for the job in the hiring process.

The salary cap is paramount. And so is understanding it.

It is a part of virtually every decision that every general manager makes in the post-lockout NHL world. It was a factor in the Johnny Boychuk trade before the 2014-15 season. It was a factor in structuring the contract that Jarome Iginla signed in Boston. It was a factor in the firing of Peter Chiarelli as Boston’s GM at the end of this season.


“They don’t really have a good understanding, maybe the complete player payroll, contracts,” he said. “I think that has a lot to do with CapGeek not being around anymore.”

CapGeek.com was the revolutionary and independently run website that compiled and organized player contracts, a site that was shuttered in January because of creator Matthew Wuest’s battle with colon cancer, to which he succumbed in March at 35 years old.

CapGeek’s absence has been felt around the hockey community, despite comments made by commissioner Gary Bettman in February. That goes for GMs — Chiarelli lamented its absence in a March press conference — as well as fans. And in recent weeks, new options have popped up for anyone who wants all things salary-related at his or her fingertips.

Late CapGeek founder Matthew Wuest. Jeff Harper/Metro Halifax

Just one week after its first tweet, and without any apparent attempts at publicity, General Fanager had already amassed 11,715 followers on Twitter. Hockey’s Cap has built a sleek website with an “Armchair GM” feature, as there was on CapGeek, and which General Fanager intends to add soon. And as part of a summer relaunch, NHLNumbers is beefing up the salary section of a site already known for its statistical prowess.


And those aren’t the only options. Greg Sinclair of hockeystats.ca raised $1,550 in four months on a GoFundMe campaign for a new CapGeek-type site, and CapFriendly has found its own following as a potential replacement.

All of these new (and old) sites owe a debt to CapGeek and to Wuest, who was honored recently by the Red Wings, who named their NHL prospect tournament the Matthew Wuest Memorial Cup.

Putting in the hours

The sites are reactions, homages, even ways to honor Wuest, with their owners expressing a certain reverence for their predecessor. They are also necessary for understanding the intricacies of an NHL team.

“I’ve written about this a few times, actually,” said Thomas Drance, who is in charge of content at the Nation Network, which owns NHLnumbers.com. “CapGeek.com was the most significant act of hockey journalism of the last decade, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I think any site that is doing this and claims not to be kind of inspired by CapGeek or worked on because of what happened with CapGeek is probably lying,” said Tom Poraszka, who developed General Fanager.

“I think CapGeek was great and did everything so well that for the time that it was available there was no need for anything else. You didn’t really need an alternative.”

Now, though, you do.

And it was clear that the NHL was not going to do it. Despite an uptick in the amount of data available from the league — which has finally embraced analytics on its website — Bettman was dismissive of the desire for fans to have salary data.


When Bettman was at TD Garden for a game against the Canucks in late February, he said, “We hear from the fans on a regular basis and we hear on lots and lots of issues. We’re not getting a lot of feedback on that. It’s not something that seems to be driving fan interest as much as perhaps the interest of the [media] people in this room and your colleagues.”

To many, the comments sounded misguided, out of touch.

Both Poraszka and Jamie Davis, who created Hockey’s Cap, are spending hours and hours of their free time (“pretty much every moment I’m not on my full-time job,” Poraszka said) on their sites. Poraszka estimates it at 40-60 hours per week on General Fanager in addition to his job as product manager for an automotive website. He said General Fanager is already seeing 4,000-10,000 users per day.

Unlike Drance, neither Poraszka nor Davis is a journalist by trade. (Davis, who is helped with the site by his two brothers, is an engineer who has been web developing in his spare time.)

“I think, to us, the important thing is that this information becomes available, whether it’s through us or through another party, that’s not the most important thing,” Poraszka said. “We just want people to have ready access to this information, for what Matthew did to carry on, and for people to continue to be able to get all that hard work that he was able to put together.”


The sites feature team-by-team salary-cap data in mostly easy-to-digest formats, including AHL information. There are notes on no-movement clauses and performance bonuses.

It’s a wealth of data in one place.

“I don’t feel like I could be a fan without knowing this stuff,” Poraszka said. “Since the cap was implemented, it’s become so integral to every transaction every team makes. It’s probably the leading concern with any signing, any move a team makes, with things like players being sent down and you know those are fueled by cap implications.

“As a fan myself, I didn’t feel like I could get a good understanding of what my team was doing and what their options were unless I had a good grasp on the cap situation.

“I think it’s pretty integral for fans, and based on the initial reaction that we’ve received, I think it indicates that we’re not the only ones who feel that way.”

Long way to go

The sites are not yet perfect. There are glitches. And there are numbers that aren’t quite accurate. Though both General Fanager and Hockey’s Cap have Patrice Bergeron’s cap number listed at $6.875 million — the correct number — NHLnumbers still has it at $6.5 million.

The bigger issue will be how the sites continue to update themselves with new contract information.

All acknowledge that much of their data still comes from cached versions of CapGeek. In fact, Poraszka is careful to relay that General Fanager mined CapGeek’s data manually rather than scraping it with a script. That’s important to him.


It will be important, too, to see the networks that the new sites can cultivate, as they work to confirm information from fine print on contracts to the status of players on injured reserve. (In the interest of full disclosure, Wuest once asked me to confirm something for him, which I did, with Chiarelli.)

The work has begun, by Davis and Poraszka, to build their roster of sources, to get the information that they and their readers crave. The work is well underway to build a new, better salary page.

The litmus test will be the long term.

“There’s obviously a race,” Drance said. “There’s a lot of players here trying to come up with the best resource. I think it’s a testament to how difficult that’s going to be.

“There’s no doubt about it, this is a gargantuan undertaking. I don’t think it’s a surprise that so far no one’s really managed to step into the breach in a way that anyone is like, OK, we’re there, we’ve got that.

“We’re still in the dark ages, as it were.”

Amalie Benjamin can be reached at abenjamin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @amaliebenjamin.