These comments sound like a lot of sour grapes and entitlement to me. You don't own CapFriendly and they have no responsibility to make you happy. The people that put the development work in deserve to reap the benefits. You are owed nothing.
As far as being a Caps fan, yeah I'm fine with them doing this if they think it will give the organization a competitive advantage. There are no rules against teams acquiring assets that help them manage the team more efficiently and effectively. Maybe you're just upset that your team didn't think of it first.
Capfriendly owes me nothing, sure.
Me and others also have the right to speak my mind about how a certain organization making my experience worse is bad for the sport and the league. We also can point out - again - that it is doubtful that acquiring capfriendly actually provides any competitive advantage.
The only real thing of value that Capfriendly provides is convenient access to the NHL registry - all else is public data and relatively rudimentary programming.
Seeing how all NHL teams have access to the NHL registry as a baseline... I don't really see how this is a huge advantage. I bet half of hfboards has functional programming skills or at the very least excel skills good enough to develop a functional version of Capfriendly. Certainly all NHL teams have access to labor talent that could really provide this level of tool.
Then note that the site is going dark on July 5th - the caps aren't even gaining a Free agency, draft, or trade deadline advantage over teams that theoretically don't already have these tools in place... Because like I said getting one of them developed is certainly possible within a few months.
Best case scenario the caps wanted to hire the owner of the site - but then they didn't need to shut the site down, they could have just made him transfer ownership and signed an airtight contract.
