Dominik and Jamie had learned their lesson a few times … or so they thought.

Leading up to the first day of NHL free agency on July 1, the co-partners of Cap Friendly discussed how much traffic they might expect and decided to prepare for more than that. They had been wrong in the past and were hoping to not make that same mistake. It was best to have too much server space than not enough.

Even though Jamie Davis and Dominik (who has asked for his last name to be omitted because his employer is unaware of his role in Cap Friendly) have full-time jobs and only make enough money off the site’s ads to pay for maintenance costs, they run Cap Friendly like a business, and a crashed site isn’t good for business.

But they felt confident this year. They had done their planning. They and their team of three contributors were set to go. They were ready for the influx of signings. They were ready to update rosters, cap spaces and more. They were ready to take on as many web visitors as they could imagine.

But there was one thing they weren’t ready for: John Tavares signing with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

It was a chain reaction. The news broke, then the website broke. People flocked to the site seeking the cap implications of the signing. Dominik and Jamie keep their site’s numbers private, but they were willing to say Cap Friendly took on five times their normal amount of traffic after the Tavares signing.

As Jamie, the lead developer, worked to get the site back up, the public repeatedly tried to get on it. He was up against a massive tidal wave of fans interested in salary information – so much for Gary Bettman’s theory — and had no chance. All he could do was wait. The site was down for an hour and a half.

“Panic,” Jamie said, laughing as he explained his reaction. “It’s never fun seeing that happen. I get on the server administrative control and try to get it back running. With the Tavares situation, there’s so much traffic hitting the servers. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do much in that case.”

Dominik, also laughing, said, “It just went down like a bag of sand. It was crazy.”

Jamie and Dominik didn’t know each other four years ago, but they shared a great respect for CapGeek and its late founder Matthew Wuest.

To them, Wuest was an innovator who changed the game and made everyone insiders by giving them a window into player salaries and cap payrolls.

“CapGeek was the gold standard in terms of any hockey-related site, especially for salary cap and related info,” Dominik said. “To this day, we’ve been working together for 3 1/2 years and have a lot of tools and features, but we’re only a fraction of what CapGeek was and what he built. It was the first of its kind. We built something he had thought of. We were just picking up the ball and carrying it where he left off. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We can never be what he was.”

Wuest ceased operations of the site in January 2015, passing away at age of 35 later that year due to cancer.

Without CapGeek, the public largely lost its access to the league’s financial information, and plenty of people had the same idea to start up a site to fill that void.

Dominik and Jamie were two of them.

Dominik, who is 39, has a computer science background and works from his home in Montreal. He and a friend began working on a website in early 2015 and named it CapFriendly.com.

Elsewhere in Canada, Jamie, 27, a mechanical engineer who lives in Kingston, Ontario, and his two brothers, Ryan and Chris, were building their own site, which they named HockeysCap.com.

Dominik and Jamie took notice of each other’s sites and reached out to congratulate the other when they launched in 2015. They were competitors, but there was also a mutual respect.

Not too long after their respective sites were born, both realized they may be over their heads. The workload was much more than they expected. Building a site was a lot in itself, but then you had to actually track down salaries – something more and more teams are starting to reveal, but they still mostly come from agents and league insiders – update rosters and cap totals, understand the CBA and much more.

“I had another guy who was building Cap Friendly, and he found it overwhelming and bowed out,” Dominik said. “I [was] really close to having to shut it down. I didn’t have my developer, and I couldn’t do it on my own. Jamie around that time came calling and we talked about we would complement each other quite well. We saw the advantage of getting together.”

The group decided on Cap Friendly as the website name and used the code and interface from Hockey’s Cap. Jamie is the lead developer. Dominik gathers information, cultivates relationships with insiders and has a strong knowledge of the CBA. Ryan Davis, Chris Davis and Joe Mazza are part-time contributors who help in a variety of ways.

CONTRACT UPDATE It was initially reported that Cam Ward had a No Trade Clause included in his $3M deal with the #Blackhawks It is in fact a No Move Clause. Why is that relevant? In addition to blocking a trade, a NMC prohibits waivers or assignment to the minors without consent pic.twitter.com/HKGuNjKd0P — CapFriendly (@CapFriendly) July 4, 2018

When a trade or signing occurs, the Cap Friendly team figures out who is available and divvies up the responsibilities, from tracking down information, to updating the site, to posting on social media. They’ve become a well-oiled machine in that way.

“Everyone has their own role,” Jamie said. “It kind of fits in nice as a puzzle.”

The site is constant — Dominik said they put in 40-45 hours per week — and so is their communication. Dominik and Jamie are either chatting through instant message or by phone throughout the day. Although they live about two hours apart, they’ve only met each other in person twice.

For people who were strangers just a few years ago, Dominik and Jamie are surprised by how close they’ve become and how well they work together.

“Honestly, every single day has been amazing,” Jamie said. “We’ve enjoyed it from the start to now. Working with Dom has been an absolute pleasure. We see eye to eye on most tools; I’d say the vast majority. We’re on the phone all the time. We’re messaging all day, every single day. Honestly from a working perspective, I don’t think the relationship could have gone any better.”

Dominik feels the same way.

“Our working relationship is tremendous,” Dominik said. “It started as a working relationship. We’ve turned into a really good friendship. We’re always on the same [wave]length, which is rare. With Jamie and I, that’s how it’s easy — we’re always on the same [wave]length. We’re always thinking the same thing. We’ve never ran into a situation where I say we disagree very strong or cause a rift, which is pretty amazing.”

Most people visit Cap Friendly to find how much players make and how much cap space their favorite teams have left, but it’s evolved into a lot more since it first launched in 2016.

The site’s tools include an Armchair GM, where users can add or subtract from teams’ rosters while keeping track of cap space. There are also mock drafts, six different calculators to figure out everything from waivers to qualifying offers, contract comparables, frequently asked questions about the CBA, team reserve lists and more.

Jamie and Dominik’s goal is to have something for everyone and something for every in-season and offseason facet of the league.

“As the year goes, the NHL from the season and offseason, there’s different, important aspects,” Jamie said. “We have qualifying offers then professional tryouts coming up. Those kind of events as they take place, we have been able to identify and maybe make a cool tool for. Sometimes we [get] questions and emails and come up with ideas we never thought. Once we have the initial idea in mind, then we’ll usually decide if it’s worth something.”

Fans are the most frequent visitors to the site, but it’s also useful for people who work in and around the league. For a lot of hockey writers, it’s the go-to site for cap information. Cap Friendly is referenced throughout The Athletic’s hockey coverage.

The Athletic Canada’s James Mirtle often uses the Armchair GM function and places images from his custom rosters right into his stories.

“That site is, at this point, an essential service,” Mirtle said. “I couldn’t do my job nearly as well without it.”

Cap Friendly’s Armchair GM function gives fans the chance to build and adjust the rosters of their favorite teams.

The Athletic Detroit’s Craig Custance utilizes Cap Friendly for his pieces on the Detroit Red Wings and the league as a whole.

“In a short period of time, Cap Friendly has become the industry standard for salary information,” Custance said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’m talking to a source and they’ll refer to it or are looking at it while we’re talking. Behind the scenes, they’re just as helpful in explaining CBA and cap nuances. I must be on that site at least three or four times a day.”

Count beat writers Eric Stephens and Aaron Portzline among those people too.

“I’ll be the first to say I don’t commit every salary of every player to memory as much as I try do,” Stephens said. “Certainly I try to do so with the team I cover and follow the most. But I’ve found it to be extremely thorough and, most importantly, accurate. I do believe it has influenced teams to include dollar figures in the press releases of their player signings, which had never happened.

“Can’t be remiss to point out the massive influence Matthew Wuest and Capgeek.com had on fueling the interest of hockey fans and the sport’s industry. It made the NHL, in my opinion, much more accessible to the common fan and helped him or her become more knowledgeable about the league beyond what happens on the ice. Cap Friendly has not only become a worthy successor but perhaps improved upon that with the great detail it has for each player on its website.”

Portzline said, “I use the site almost weekly. I keep my own numbers for Blue Jackets contracts, but it’s helpful for checking contracts around the league — say when a trade is made — and it’s great to use to check one’s homework, such as qualifying offers, buyout numbers, etc.”

And while the NHL does make its own salary information available within the league, there are people who still turn to Cap Friendly as a resource.

“It’s gotten better over the years,” one Eastern Conference executive said. “It’s gotten better information and substance to what they provide. I know there are teams, executives, management that certainly do use it.”

The John Tavares signing was an eye-opener for Jamie and Dominik — they’ve updated their servers four times since launching, and it’s just another reminder of how much the site has grown.

“Oh yeah, yeah, it’s been much more successful I would have ever thought,” Jamie said. “It’s been a wild rise. It’s gone bigger than I could have imagined, absolutely.”

Dominik said, “It’s really hard to put into words to be honest. We never thought it would be used at that level. We never thought it would be a go-to site or the media would be using it or the people in the hockey community would be using it. Our idea was just to build something because we loved CapGeek so much. To see where it is now, to see how many people go to the site, how many reach out and say they love the site, it’s really a humbling and a tremendous honor to be able to do this and occasionally get compared to CapGeek.”

What CapGeek started and Cap Friendly is continuing is giving fans the opportunity to be even more informed about players, teams and the NHL as a whole.

“I can tell you we get a lot of people who are really interested in the site and the numbers and how much players make and how teams’ salary caps work because it allows them to peek into how front offices work and what they’re looking at,” Dominik said. “Fans are really knowledgeable and they’re looking for new way to interact with their favorite players and teams. Twenty-five years ago, that was looking at the back of baseball cards to see how tall he is, how many points he has. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re looking at salary cap information and we’re examining players that way. It helps them better understand the game and their team. They’re better educated about their team. That’s why they like it. It draws them closer to their favorite club.”

Dominik and Jamie have never had any communication with the NHL or the NHLPA, so they’re unsure exactly where the league stands on their site. One NHL executive said he believed Cap Friendly’s presence was good for the league.

“I think it’s beneficial anytime we can bring our fans closer to touching the game and interacting with it and learning more about the game,” the executive said. “Not only what goes on the ice, but what goes off the ice, the business side if you will. Maybe they understand and analyze why certain personnel decisions were being made due to cap decisions, financial decisions.”

Dominik and Jamie plan to continue expanding the site. It’ll soon be available in French, something many people in Canada have been asking for for some time.

“We’ve been working on it probably over a year at this point,” Jamie said. “It’s been a long journey. We’re really excited about it.”

The partners expressed excitement over a lot of things they’ve done and continue to do with Cap Friendly. They admitted the site does take up a lot of time, but neither was complaining. Cap Friendly is done by choice, and it remains an easy choice for them.

“Almost all my spare time goes to the site,” Jamie said. “It’s like two full-time jobs to be honest. There have been times to step away from it, but I’ve never felt burned out. I’m still enjoying it and pushing through. I’m always thinking how to code it.”

Dominik felt the same.

“It definitely doesn’t feel like a job,” said Dominik, who doesn’t envision trying to monetize the site through donations or any other method. “It’s a lot of hours, but it doesn’t feel like a job. It’s something from Day 1 that’s been fun for us and continues to be fun. Any time we have a new idea or work on something new, it’s just as exciting as we were working on the first thing in 2015. We definitely haven’t wavered with our love for the site. We just want to keep building and adding tools for the site and keep going.”

And keep upgrading servers. July 1, 2019 could be another blockbuster day as Erik Karlsson, Artemi Panarin and other big names could be available, and Cap Friendly will undoubtedly be prepared.

(Top photo: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images)