Around the League - 2023/24

[henchman21]

I think the Caps would have to honor previous agreements made by CF. Depending on the details of licensing agreements teams could keep access.

Teams have been notified of the termination already. It’ll be done for them in July.

 

[Colorado Avalanche]

https://x.com/i/web/status/1799856519321628918

Great Rangers, Toronto will sign all the late boomers.

Yeah no thank you.

 

[Metallo]

Teams have been notified of the termination already. It’ll be done for them in July.

Well, I hope teams learn from that. Losing parts of your analytical operations because you lose access to data from data providers is some shoddy contracting.

 

[PAZ]

I hope he made a killing.

It just sucks to live in the data and information age and to constantly have both taken away from the public sphere.

The funny thing is it also hurts NHL teams too.

The NHL really should've stepped in and just officially partnered with Capfriendly, rather than investing all that money trying to improve the NHL site and their crappy advance stats.

 

[The Moops]

The funny thing is it also hurts NHL teams too.

The NHL really should've stepped in and just officially partnered with Capfriendly, rather than investing all that money trying to improve the NHL site and their crappy advance stats.

The new NHL API sucks bad too. Lots of things are missing from the previous one. Kinda sucky the way they changed it

 

[The Abusement Park]

Well, I hope teams learn from that. Losing parts of your analytical operations because you lose access to data from data providers is some shoddy contracting.

Tbf it shouldn’t be too hard for a sports team to be able to create a cap friendly like tool to use.

 

[The Moops]

Tbf it shouldn’t be too hard for a sports team to be able to create a cap friendly like tool to use.

With what they pay engineers?

 

[Balthazar]

Tbf it shouldn’t be too hard for a sports team to be able to create a cap friendly like tool to use.

The shell is worthless if you have no data coming in.

Teams will have to hire a lot of people if they want their own site. Capfriendly wasnt just one dude updating the website with the stuff coming on his twitter feed, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

The Caps will likely employ the people that were working there, they didn’t just buy a website.

 

[Gumballhead]

Just put a nice logo on this color scheme:

I don’t have my glasses on but is that the Ween logo??

 

[a mangy Meowth]

The shell is worthless if you have no data coming in.

Teams will have to hire a lot of people if they want their own site. Capfriendly wasnt just one dude updating the website with the stuff coming on his twitter feed, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

The Caps will likely employ the people that were working there, they didn’t just buy a website.

You really love just saying shit without verifying it don't you?

The most I'm seeing any site list them at is 25 employees and I doubt that #. And if you honestly think web dev takes that many people idk what to say

 

[Ararana]

You really love just saying shit without verifying it don't you?

View attachment 881171

The most I'm seeing any site list them at is 25 employees and I doubt that #. And if you honestly think web dev takes that many people idk what to say

You're both right and wrong.

Given the change log frequency we've seen on CapFriendly, it's probably safe to say they currently only have a few devs running maintenance. But it only takes a few devs to maintain a web app that already been written and is limited in features. CapFriendly only does a few things VERY well. And I'd imagine most of the maintenance is keeping data up to data with constantly changing contracts.

However, I'm sure they had more devs during the development stage of the SDLC. And given that teams now have to spin this up from the very start, and do it extremely quick because they just had the rug pulled from under them and are now tool-less, two devs are not going to meet that kind of deadline when you consider ETL of metric data, the UI and backend development, not to mention all the bullshit they'll have to put up with from NHL management groups who have no idea how technology works.

They'll need a bigger team up front to get all the architecture designed and written. Once completed, they can scale back and go into support mode.

Any teams that suffers from this has only themselves to blame, they should have done this in-house a long time ago. I'm shocked it took CapFriendly this long to sell out, and I'm surprised the NHL themselves wasn't the one to purchase them.

 

[S E P H]

Damn, I saw the news about CF and seriously Caps, do they really think this will make a difference?

Puckpedia IU and the aesthetics of it look bad. Like how HockeyDB is a 1990s version of EliteProspect level bad.

Any teams that suffers from this has only themselves to blame, they should have done this in-house a long time ago. I'm shocked it took CapFriendly this long to sell out, and I'm surprised the NHL themselves wasn't the one to purchase them.

I don't think the NHL wants to release contract information...or are you talking about the NHL purchasing them to shut them down?

 

[Ararana]

I don't think the NHL wants to release contract information...or are you talking about the NHL purchasing them to shut them down?

I've thought for years that the NHL would eventually purchase them to shut them down. They're essentially direct competition and the NHL can't control the visibility of contract data.

The smart move would have been to aquire them and bring their tools under the NHL.com umbrella. Contract information for pro sports will never be truly 'hidden', just embrace it. There's a reason CapFriendly was so crazy popular. But we can't expect the great minds behind the NHL will ever be that smart.

 

[henchman21]

CF was mostly Davis and Zrim. There have been others involved at different times and lots of consultants, but they’ve never been a large organization.

Many teams have their own version of this stuff (nhl gives them a database to link to), but a number have just used this information because it was far cheaper than having actual employees. Why pay someone 60k plus benefits when you can use the api for 15k?

 

[ASmileyFace]

CF was mostly Davis and Zrim. There have been others involved at different times and lots of consultants, but they’ve never been a large organization.

Many teams have their own version of this stuff (nhl gives them a database to link to), but a number have just used this information because it was far cheaper than having actual employees. Why pay someone 60k plus benefits when you can use the api for 15k?

Makes me wonder how much the Caps paid for CapFriendly. Is paying a few hundred grand (or more?) to have exclusive use of this tool worth it? Were some teams that reliant on CapFriendly?

 

[Ararana]

Makes me wonder how much the Caps paid for CapFriendly. Is paying a few hundred grand (or more?) to have exclusive use of this tool worth it? Were some teams that reliant on CapFriendly?

I'd be quite surprised if CapFriendly sold for only a couple hundred grand. I'd bet they got seven digits.

 

[henchman21]

Makes me wonder how much the Caps paid for CapFriendly. Is paying a few hundred grand (or more?) to have exclusive use of this tool worth it? Were some teams that reliant on CapFriendly?

I wouldn't expect the value to be all that high, but likely more than a few hundred grand. We don't really know the revenue, but we can assume pretty safely it is cheaper per team than an employee would be. If we just guess 20k per team per season with 15 teams, that's 300k. Figure 35-50k in ad revenue, we'll do 50k to be generous. 350k. At a 3x multiplier that is 1.05m. If that amount is 15k and 11 teams with 30k in ad revenue, we're a shade under a half million.

I can't see them being bought out under 3x revs... but can't see higher than 5x revs despite a very low overhead business with high profitability just because of the TAM. Now if their NBA spinoff is a part of it, that likely also has value and a slightly larger TAM than CF simply because there are more revenues and the cap is more complicated.

TLDR, I'd expect the CF (not NBA spinoff) buyout to fall in the upper end of the 500k-1m range. If the NBA spinoff is included add 150%.

 

[The Moops]

The most I'm seeing any site list them at is 25 employees and I doubt that #. And if you honestly think web dev takes that many people idk what to say

You'd be blown away with how many web devs work on "simple" applications

I wouldn't expect the value to be all that high, but likely more than a few hundred grand. We don't really know the revenue, but we can assume pretty safely it is cheaper per team than an employee would be. If we just guess 20k per team per season with 15 teams, that's 300k. Figure 35-50k in ad revenue, we'll do 50k to be generous. 350k. At a 3x multiplier that is 1.05m. If that amount is 15k and 11 teams with 30k in ad revenue, we're a shade under a half million.

I can't see them being bought out under 3x revs... but can't see higher than 5x revs despite a very low overhead business with high profitability just because of the TAM. Now if their NBA spinoff is a part of it, that likely also has value and a slightly larger TAM than CF simply because there are more revenues and the cap is more complicated.

TLDR, I'd expect the CF (not NBA spinoff) buyout to fall in the upper end of the 500k-1m range. If the NBA spinoff is included add 150%.

I figured 1M would be the low end (for a tech site at least. I know sports owners are cheap though)

 

[henchman21]

I figured 1M would be the low end (for a tech site at least. I know sports owners are cheap though)

If the Caps aren't going to sell the service, they'll simply buy it for as cheap as it takes to gobble up the site as they will get no use for the revenue. Those numbers are just pulled from thin air, but roughly what I'd see the services 'worth' given what teams pay elsewhere. From there the valuation really depends on them cornering the whole NHL market, which I doubt it would even be possible to get all 32 teams... but that's pretty much your max growth. So PE would only value the company as a multiple of that total revenue (they'd really be looking at profit, but those numbers are even harder for us to know), which would be unlikely to ever top .75-1m. A company that is maxed out in their target market is unlikely to even attract PE money, but if it was.. the multiple would fall under 2. Very limited cap on growth here.

There is kind of a reason we see the analytics site guys go for jobs vs their sites and methodology being bought out. There just isn't a ton of money there and the jobs ends up paying more over the course of 5-6-7 years... plus more opportunity.

I could see very low single digit millions (especially if the NBA side is included), but I don't see it as much more than that.

 

[The Moops]

There is kind of a reason we see the analytics site guys go for jobs vs their sites and methodology being bought out. There just isn't a ton of money there and the jobs ends up paying more over the course of 5-6-7 years... plus more opportunity.

Yeah that's a good point, which is pretty sad when you consider how much teams are paying. I think the last one I saw for the Avs was like $70-80k? I saw one for the TBL that was like $40k lol. Salaries for baseball jobs were substantially higher, but still not great.

Although I'm assuming they'd be paying more than the standard posted salary if you had some kind of newer methodology though

 

[henchman21]

Yeah that's a good point, which is pretty sad when you consider how much teams are paying. I think the last one I saw for the Avs was like $70-80k? I saw one for the TBL that was like $40k lol. Salaries for baseball jobs were substantially higher, but still not great.

Although I'm assuming they'd be paying more than the standard posted salary if you had some kind of newer methodology though

There are some making a lot more than that, but the numbers are far below the industry standard if you get out of sports. That Avs job read like a 125-150k job in private industry. People who do this are really sold on the idea of working for a professional sports team and the high end opportunity it presents.

 

[The Moops]

People who do this are really sold on the idea of working for a professional sports team and the high end opportunity it presents.

That's the exact line the Red Sox and Tigers tried to give me when they made offers lmao

 

[Balthazar]

Possibly the new Klingberg:

 

[Tommy Shelby]

Possibly the Klingberg:

This is gonna be the next big "Oh, yikes" contract

 

[ASmileyFace]

@henchman21 thanks for all the detailed replies! Really appreciate the time, thought and expertise you and so many others around here provide.