CapGeek

» see capgeek.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed capgeek. hockey is not a turkish sport at any layer i grew up around, and the nhl salary cap is not a thing anyone in ankara has ever needed to look up. still, the site is worth remembering. capgeek's whole reason for existing was that the nhl imposed a salary cap in 2005 and the resulting contract math got complicated enough that fans and journalists both needed a live database.

matthew wuest was a computer science and journalism graduate from stanley, new brunswick, who worked days at metro halifax and ran capgeek at nights. the site started in 2009 as salarycapcalculator.com and got renamed after his wife suggested a shorter name. by 2011 the hockey news had put wuest on its top hundred most influential people in hockey list, mostly because nhl teams themselves used capgeek as their reference source for contract information.

capgeek shut down on 3 january 2015 with a single-sentence statement on the homepage. the sudden decision was made with a heavy heart and was due to the personal health of the founder. wuest died on 19 march 2015 of colon cancer. he was thirty-five. the detroit red wings later named their annual prospect tournament trophy the matthew wuest memorial cup.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

capgeek was a live database of every nhl player contract, with cap hits and no-trade clauses tracked per team. before capgeek this information existed only in scattered team-office spreadsheets and the collective bargaining agreement text itself. wuest read the cba and translated it into a public tool. the pages loaded fast, the numbers matched what teams internally believed, and the site was free.

this last point mattered more than it looked. capgeek was reference infrastructure for professionals that happened to be public. journalists at the hockey news, sportsnet, tsn, and the athletic all cited it. team front offices used it to cross-check their own trade calculations. it was the shape of what wikipedia turned out to be for encyclopedic knowledge, applied to one small corner of sports salary law.

~ the day it died ~

the homepage on 3 january 2015 was a black page with one paragraph. the site was closing effective immediately. the reason was wuest's personal health. no successor was named and no downloads were offered. multiple six-figure offers to buy the site had already been declined during the previous year.

[[capfriendly]] launched in may 2015 with three brothers named davis and a designer named zrim, filling the gap almost immediately. puckpedia and hockeyscap appeared over the same window. the shape of what capgeek had built survived. the specific database and the specific author did not. wuest died two and a half months after the site went dark.

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