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CapGeek ceases operations

Deebo

Moderator
http://www.capgeek.com/operations-ceased

Effective immediately, Jan. 3, 2015, CapGeek.com has permanently ceased operations. This sudden decision is made with a heavy heart and is due to the personal health of CapGeek.com founder and director Matthew Wuest. While this decision may raise many questions, it is requested that you respect Matthew's privacy and wish for no media or purchase inquiries. Thank you for your co-operation and understanding at this difficult time.
 
Too bad about his health problems. I've never actually visited the site. I usually go to nhlnumbers.com to look up salaries and cap hits.
 
Bullfrog said:
Too bad about his health problems. I've never actually visited the site. I usually go to nhlnumbers.com to look up salaries and cap hits.

Capgeek did some useful things that Nhlnumbers doesn't unfortunately. Small stuff like noting who had nmc's and having a single central page for every team's cap situation but important enough that I'd switched over in recent years. With any luck this might make the guys at nhlnumbers change things up a bit.
 
Nik the Trik said:
Bullfrog said:
Too bad about his health problems. I've never actually visited the site. I usually go to nhlnumbers.com to look up salaries and cap hits.

Capgeek did some useful things that Nhlnumbers doesn't unfortunately. Small stuff like noting who had nmc's and having a single central page for every team's cap situation but important enough that I'd switched over in recent years. With any luck this might make the guys at nhlnumbers change things up a bit.

All their calculators (buyout, armchair GM, waiver exemption) were things you really couldn't find anywhere else either.
 
Nik the Trik said:
Capgeek did some useful things that Nhlnumbers doesn't unfortunately. Small stuff like noting who had nmc's and having a single central page for every team's cap situation but important enough that I'd switched over in recent years. With any luck this might make the guys at nhlnumbers change things up a bit.

The waiver and buyout calculators were also very useful, as were the reserve list pages and such. I like the way nhlnumbers actually breaks individual player cap hits down by how long they've been on the active roster, but, it's just not as strong a site.
 
Awful news. I wish the hockey community got to know Matthew Wuest, not just "Capgeek". I didn't even know his real name before he announced he was stopping the site, and the I think that was the case for most people. He sounded like a really great guy. RIP.
 
Some thoughts from a co-worker of his:

[tweet]578730625299017730[/tweet]
[tweet]578730747537833984[/tweet]
[tweet]578731165676388352[/tweet]
[tweet]578731252582367233[/tweet]
 
That sucks. Makes the decision to shut the site down the way he did a lot more understandable.
 
CtB posted a link to Friedman's column today that had this tidbit in it:

29. As hockey fans and reporters salute the late Matthew Wuest, founder of Capgeek.com, one note about salaries appearing on NHL.com.

After the site was closed, the league did discuss the possibility, with some teams in favour but others were opposed. (You can probably divide it by those who reveal contract numbers and those who don?t.) Ultimately, the idea was discounted, because there wasn?t consensus.

That lead to another article about Wuest's passing that contained this:

Commissioner Gary Bettman told a small group of reporters in Santa Clara, Calif., recently that he didn't think there was significant fan interest in the subject, and there are concerns about how much of that information owners want to be public.

I sort of buy the idea that that there are things that owners/Gms don't want public. Details about limited or full NTCs or the like but I absolutely don't get the idea that there isn't significant fan interest in the basics or that by keeping these numbers off the NHL's site they're in any way muting the conversation about cap hits and the like.

I've never found, as a fan of any sport, that having as much information as possible was a bad or distracting thing and honestly, it seems like 90% of what we talk about when it comes to acquiring players or building teams has to do with the cap. It's not like term and cap hits end up as secrets so why in the world wouldn't the NHL want to be in on that?

Honestly, it just seems like another area where they operate with a pretty heavy dose of disdain for their customers.
 
Nik the Trik said:
That lead to another article about Wuest's passing that contained this:

Commissioner Gary Bettman told a small group of reporters in Santa Clara, Calif., recently that he didn't think there was significant fan interest in the subject, and there are concerns about how much of that information owners want to be public.

I sort of buy the idea that that there are things that owners/Gms don't want public. Details about limited or full NTCs or the like but I absolutely don't get the idea that there isn't significant fan interest in the basics or that by keeping these numbers off the NHL's site they're in any way muting the conversation about cap hits and the like.

I've never found, as a fan of any sport, that having as much information as possible was a bad or distracting thing and honestly, it seems like 90% of what we talk about when it comes to acquiring players or building teams has to do with the cap. It's not like term and cap hits end up as secrets so why in the world wouldn't the NHL want to be in on that?

Honestly, it just seems like another area where they operate with a pretty heavy dose of disdain for their customers.

That Bettman quote was from when the league revealed their new advanced stats pages. Someone asked if the league would look into a capgeek replacement and Bettman said he felt that fans had more interest in the advanced stats than cap information. I mean, I really like the advanced stats, and even I'd call bull on that. Somebody tweeted that at its peak ExtraSkater never broke the top 100,000 sites globally in traffic, while Capgeek hit 20,000 mark. Michael Grange reported awhile back that on July 1st 2010 the site had 3.5 million hits, and that was before he added a bunch of his most popular tools. So I'm really hoping that Gary was just lying through his teeth when he said that.
 
I get that there's likely some privacy issues, but the cap is a huge factor in the whole player transactions thing.  It's really tough for fans to opine on, or get interested in that part of the sport, if they don't have this information.
 
Frank E said:
I get that there's likely some privacy issues, but the cap is a huge factor in the whole player transactions thing.  It's really tough for fans to opine on, or get interested in that part of the sport, if they don't have this information.

Yeah it's not like it's some ancillary thing - the cap is relevant for basically every single move made in the NHL.
 

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