Where did CapWages come from? How a Toronto tech entrepreneur created hockey’s popular new website

TORONTO — The announcement in June that CapFriendly was shutting down and being sold to the Washington Capitals sent much of the hockey world into a panic.

The website had become such a favorite tool for fans everywhere, not to mention the NHL media, and the idea that it was disappearing was disappointing, albeit understandable from the founders’ perspective.

If you’re unfamiliar, a quick story to illustrate how much CapFriendly had become part of the fabric of hockey: A few years ago, I was interviewing an NHL general manager, and he wanted to double-check a contract detail on an NHL player. So what’d he do? Called up CapFriendly on his phone. Even though he had access via the league to those details, it was just easier to check CapFriendly.

So, yes, the news of CapFriendly’s exit left many searching for something new.

PuckPedia was already in place as a trusted alternative. While respecting that site, a Toronto-based tech entrepreneur believed he could build something that more fully filled the CapFriendly void. And he decided to spring into action.

Robert, 41, asked The Athletic not to use his last name in this article, citing a desire to protect his privacy. He launched CapWages in mid-June, just ahead of CapFriendly’s shuttering — and NHL free agency on July 1.

“Listen, they’re doing great,” Robert said of PuckPedia, which provides player contract details and a full suite of features, including a new waivers tracker. “I think we’re very lucky that they’re around and providing that service.”

But he thought he could create something that more directly mirrored the layout users were used to on CapFriendly.

“I said, ‘How hard can it be to build something like (CapFriendly) myself?’ So I did,” he said.

“Then July 1 came around, and that almost killed me. It turns out, it’s pretty hard.”

He let out a laugh while saying that over coffee with The Athletic. Free agency was obviously quite a learning curve.

“We’re a very small team — mostly me full-time, with a few other folks helping,” he said.

CapWages has grown quickly, though.

“Once CapFriendly closed down, like a week after, we went from a few hundred visitors a day to just under 10,000 per day,” Robert said.

The most obvious question, of course, is how does a tech guy with no background in hockey so quickly get a hold of NHL contract information?

“Some agents reached out and have been very, very helpful,” he said. “We were on Twitter pretty early on and we got noticed on Reddit and things like that, and agents started to reach out to us.”

He’s short on detail, of course, wanting to protect his sources.

In a nutshell, it sounds like people in the hockey world were eager to help him fill the CapFriendly void and have gone out of their way to help CapWages do so.

And yes, this is obviously a passion project, because Robert has a full-time job in tech, but he is a huge hockey fan.

“I have friends who are huge hockey nerds. I have friends who are spreadsheet nerds. I’m sort of like in the middle,” he said. “They don’t really get along. They each think that the other group is ridiculous. I’m kind of the overlap: technology. I love the data analytics and that side of it, but I’m a huge hockey fan since I moved here.”

He was born in Europe and moved to Toronto in 1995 and, yes, naturally became a Maple Leafs fan.

With CapWages going out of its way to look and feel similar to CapFriendly, did he have any concerns about how the Capitals might react? “Definitely not,” he said. In his mind, what the Caps were worried about in that purchase was gaining the knowledge, tools, know-how and day-to-day application of CapFriendly. Not the site itself.

(The Caps hired Jamie, Ryan and Christopher Davis from CapFriendly as part of the purchase, while the Oilers recently announced the hiring of CapFriendly co-founder Dominik Zrim, who has also worked with the Chicago Blackhawks and San Jose Sharks.)

The Caps confirmed they have no issue with CapWages.

“Our intention in acquiring CapFriendly and bringing on some of their staff was solely to enhance our hockey operations department and infrastructure,” Sergey Kocharov, senior vice president of communications for the Capitals, told The Athletic on Thursday. “We are pleased and not surprised that another similar website is preparing to launch, as has happened in the past.”

Right. Remember when CapFriendly replaced CapGeek? History repeats itself.

“The goal for me was just to create something that looks like what I was used to, just for me to use basically,” Robert said. “The other thing was that I wanted to play around with the technology that’s out there — A.I. especially.”

There are still features missing on CapWages that were on CapFriendly. It’s a work in progress. And Robert intends to integrate more A.I. software as the site grows.

“A lot of the stuff that I’m spending my time on is A.I.-related,” he said. “How do I figure out what’s going on and extract this information in an automated way and make it easy to bring it into the site?”

But A.I. is expensive. So at some point, decisions will be made on how to finance that.

“The way we structured the website, it’s very reasonable to run,” he said. “We can handle the current traffic basically on donations that we get. The goal is to not have ads, hopefully ever, but definitely for as long as possible.”

Instead, there could be a subscription model with some A.I.-backed enhanced features.

“Realistically, at some point we’re going to have to support ourselves,” he said. “But whatever we can keep free, we will.

“Basically anything that CapFriendly had would continue to be free, but some of the enhanced features we’ll have, those that cost a lot of money, we would have to put behind some sort of paywall.”

One of those features is scheduled to be introduced within the next week: an interactive tool that Robert said users will find “very helpful.”

Long term, he has another vision for the site: to help NHL teams with their cap tooling.

“I would think teams would want to have access to really good cap tooling,” he said. “So long term, what I’d love to do is provide a service for these teams to take what we have and use it internally so that they would have their own version of CapWages. And they could do additional things — run projections or simulations — with the proprietary data that they have.

“Basically, I’d love to take this and provide this as a service to teams.”

While still keeping the main site open to hockey fans.

The site still has a lot of work to do to fulfill its vision — not to mention competing against a polished site in PuckPedia. So we’ll see where it all goes for CapWages.

But it’s been an encouraging start for those missing CapFriendly.

(Graphic: Meech Robinson / The Athletic, with images from iStock)