Helene St. James

Detroit Free Press

A man passionate about hockey, supremely knowledgeable about the salary cap and with a penchant for the Detroit Red Wings will be honored at the annual NHL Prospect Tournament.

The Red Wings and training camp event organizers in Traverse City announced today that the trophy awarded to the tournament champion has been renamed the Matthew Wuest Memorial Cup. Wuest was the developer of the immensely popular CapGeek website and, before that, developed and maintained Red Wings Central, a website focused on Wings prospects.

Wuest died in March, at age 35, after a two-year battle with colon cancer.

Wings assistant general manager Ryan Martin remembers when he first met Wuest.

"I was introduced to him my first month on the job, 10 years ago, by Jim Nill," Martin told the Free Press. Nill was the assistant GM in Detroit before becoming GM of the Dallas Stars. "He had a tremendous amount of passion for the Wings. His Red Wings Central site was incredibly thorough."

Shortly after launching CapGeek, which became a resource for NHL clubs and fans for detailed contract information about every team's players, Martin and Wuest again talked regularly.

"We had a little bit of a relationship," Martin said, "and he reached out to me in the process of doing due diligence, asked me about rules and issues regarding the salary cap.

"Over the years, and I told him this, he knew the ins and outs of the CBA better than some people who work for some of the teams. The amount of time he put into maintaining the site was second to none."

Honoring Wuest at the prospect tournament, an eight-team event that precedes Detroit's main training camp, made sense, given Wuest's passion for the next generation of NHLers. "He wrote a lot of articles about the tournament," Martin said, "and he tracked statistics before there was a more centralized system.

"It's a great honor to memorialize him and remember his impact on the Wings and the NHL community."

Contact Helene St. James: hstjames@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @helenestjames.