PuckPedia on salary cap websites, #Canucks free agency, CapFriendly & working with NHL teams
our next guest has been uh a most helpful resource to secaron price our listeners followers over the years because anytime we had a question about the CBA or this that or the other thing we would go to Hart LaVine the founder of pipedia who joins us now from his home in Los Angeles Hart how are you I’m doing great yeah busy few days I’m sure you what how’s it feel to be the new it girl yeah just been rning at it for seven years and uh yeah all of a sudden uh getting some attention so yeah it’s great it’s been a long road to get to where we are today and just I’m excited for the opportunity maybe for more people to see the site and learn about it and and give it a shot you get to monitor that on on The Daily much like we do with our show you get to do with your web page visits and that sort of thing I mean has it been a pretty substantial here for sure yeah it uh yeah it’s been a big jump I mean it’s amazing the timing just last week we did some upgrades to you know prepare for free agency and we upgraded the capacity and the speed and um and also made it more flexible to respond if there’s traffic spikes and I just like thank goodness we did that last week um that would have been not a great first impression for some people if uh if we couldn’t handle the initial surge we’re gonna talk more about puckpedia it’s uh Genesis and we’re it’s going here in a moment but first uh Hart take me back a couple of days ago when you heard the news the Washington Capitals were purchasing cap friendly what what did you make of it and uh you know what do you think it means for your operation at puckpedia yeah I mean it’s an interesting decision it’s like you know I I always thought sight similar to mine or or theirs like maybe would you know a big Media Company might feel like it was a good fit I just hadn’t really thought of a team wanting to buy completely um so yeah was took me a bit by um I think it’s uh I mean it certainly shows the value of of a resource and a tool like this like I mean obviously since they’re taking it private like they didn’t value the audience or the like the traffic that it got or the ads they valued the tool and the the ability to you know manage and handle all the solary cap information and calculations and and contracts and and potentially Now using it to model things out um so it’s good validation that um a product like this has a lot of of value to people inside the game and then seeing the public um response um I think it’s super validating and encouraging that there’s a huge hunger for this type of information from fans I mean when I put the the energy into building the site many years ago I mean part of the premise was it’s hard to be a fan of a team and think you’re smarter than your team’s GM with we don’t know the salary cap situation right and so wanted to make make a site where that information was available in an accessible way to both casual and hardcore fans and engage in the information and and try to put everything a hockey fan needs in one place so when they are sitting at the bar arguing they can just pull up one thing and and get what they need did you have a barometer for how much the industry used your site and and cap friendly combined like our our we’ve had a bit of astonishment here that you know hey are they maybe easier than some of the interfaces they have in- house potentially but it just seems unfathomable that there wasn’t more inhouse versions of this um what was your understanding about how much the industry actually used you guys no that that part wasn’t surprising at all through through my relationships um yeah I mean and I do some business with teams similar to cat friendley was doing so I I got to understand what they have available and I mean there’s been a lot of public reports like the NHL just doesn’t seem to Value providing this information in a very usable digestible way that can be analyzed um both either publicly or privately like so obviously it’s the teams have access to the data they can look up whatever they need and that’s the NHL’s response they have access to it but there’s a difference between having access to look at look up a number versus having it in a you know usable platform and also accessing the data in a way that teams can add value to it analyze it present it in different ways use it in in modeling environment so I mean there’s some there’s a disparity with how far teams how far along teams are but some teams have really robust tools that like maybe similar to what the capitals are are doing with this acquisition like they have their own internal platforms and dashboards but none of that is useful without data to put into it right so I I I knew that even even the team that had tools they didn’t have a good pipeline um internally from from the league to receive data this sounds a lot like hockey analytics right that even even to this point but certainly a couple years ago how each team used it it was very individual uh as to how robust the the analytics departments were for sure and there’s like to all that it’s it’s not just as simple as like analytics like there’s three components there’s finding something to feed into it so you can actually analyze and do it and then like with analytics that’s where all the tracking technology and and a AI is coming to make some of that easier there’s people that or there’s a system to be able to view it and and look at it and analyze it and like crunch the numbers and then there’s people to smart people to be able to like gain some insights and turn into something that a management team can actually do something with so you need to kind of have all those three elements to be successful and I think you know teams in the NHL have some have all three and some have various like they’re better at some of them than others but you kind of need all three of those um because you can have a really cool system of smart people if you don’t have useful data to feed into it that doesn’t really get you anywhere either hard how how old’s puckpedia now um we launched uh almost exactly this time in 2018 so six years um so overnight success six years in the making hey uh so tell us the story tell us your story like tell us what where you were six years ago that brought you to find this establish this and you know you you said we a couple of times now tell us about the Journey of puckpedia here from its infancy sure so um you know originally from Edmonton huge hockey fan um you know my professional background in education originally was accounting and and and business and finance so obviously really into the numbers and you know when the Sol cap first came out I was on I think the first site very first site was NHL numbers I was on there checking it out and obviously a big user of capgeek and um was interested in that wanted to figure out a way into the hockey world a bit um and so yeah about 7 years ago I wanted to be more entrepreneurial um so I started doing some some business ventures um which also uh you know let me to be more control of my own time and so I kind of had an idea for what I wanted ppia to be um you know like I mentioned earlier there’s one of the key components is I wanted to be accessible to a casual fan like I I was the the guy in the group that people would ask salary cap questions and contract questions too but I would say well there’s sites you can go find that information and they said oh no those are kind of intimidating I don’t think I I’m I know enough to go on there so I wanted it to be very accessible to a casual fan I wanted it to be one place that had most of the information because again as a fan I had different tabs open flipping between different websites for you know injury news and stats and advanced stats and and things like that and then I wanted it to be really interactive and not just a place for people to see information but a people a place for people to engage and and use the information and model things out coming back to that tenant like I think most people think they’re smarter than their team’s GM or at least want to be the team’s GM and so you got to give them the information the tools to do that so U I’m not a developer I I partnered with a really talented um former hockey player that’s a developer um built the site out um launched it in 2018 it’s gone through a lot of update since then and growth and you know through that um built a lot of relationships through the league to gather the information um and yeah last actually in March we launched sort of version two a whole new design for it which um had been a long time in the in and good timing now and uh you know between myself and we adding a little bit more development resources um we we’re we were already planning to go fast over the next couple of months but I think with this news we’re going even faster so the part of the the original Vision that I think we have more work to do is on that interactivity so we have some interesting tools like we launched a pick value trade calculator and a cap relief trade calculator um but we need to we we had a interactive GM tool um we took it down down with the new design we wanted to make a better one so speeding that up hopefully have that up in a in a couple weeks um and keep going and and this is a great opportunity because you know with more attention more interest more traffic it allows me to put some more resources to it and it will just allow us to to go faster and and make it better much quicker so it’s a two-person operation with a little bit of farmed out work is that what I’m hearing Hart yeah I mean I do a lot of the work on it and I’ve got some development help from a couple key people and I’ve got some support um to keep the site updated with some of the data entry Parts um and hopefully trying to build some of that team up now to because yeah because Blake and I were wondering here yesterday like how chained are these guys to every transaction that you see not just across the NHL wire but like the HL wire and everything else we go deep on these sites like how many hours a day do you put into this and are you sitting there on the transaction wire all day it’s a lot um luckily I have some help with like the the the day-to-day transactions but it’s certainly like from after the trade deadline till now it’s like a nice relief not to have to worry about there’s going to be a huge signing or trade or or even guys getting called up and down um you know once we get now this week the the pressure starts to ramp up oh I better not put my phone down because there’s going to be uh there could be something happening for sure it is a it’s definitely a commitment for but I do have help which makes a big difference is this full-time for you or was there a time that it became full-time uh no I mean I still have my other business um interest that I handle but it seems like it’s going to be taking up more and more time um and that’s exciting I mean obviously I love hockey I love to be in the business of hockey and we’ll see where it goes from here when you say um contacts with teams and doing work for teams did they find you and reach out or did you go a hustle and try and make inroads with any it’s a mix it’s a mix I mean I’m I’m not shy so I C call and reach out to agents and teams trying to track down information and so through some of that and the persistence you start to build up relationships um and then I’ve had some inbound people reaching out appreciating the site or like just you saying that or hey they appreciate the site but there’s something that needs to be updated and they want to help keep it accurate which is super appreciated as well so um yeah it’s it’s been a combination and you know when I when I started uh I was thinking like well you know I had some ideas and I did a bunch of knocking on doors to get some of the initial information um I didn’t know exactly how I was going to stay up in all the information but that part has really come along and um yeah all these years later I have a really good network from teams and agents and media and people in the league to help um keep it all updated and accurate couple years left in the CBA well you get nervous during CBA negotiate I don’t think the salary Cap’s going away have you have you done the calculus on what a luxury tax would do for for the site and for for the business would it would it would it just change the puzzle or does do you think it diminishes the puzzle and makes maybe the site less attractive if there’s if there’s uh Escape Routes for teams and and maybe the uh the puzzle isn’t as difficult as it once was I think if you make the rules more complicated the site becomes more valuable I mean you look at like NBA NFL it’s way more complicated um like as a fan I go on sites for those Sports to check it out and I I could I could probably try to spend time to get into it but I think I have enough with the NHL so I just kind of rely on those numbers um yeah there’s a little bit of anxiety of like oh my God if there’s a more complicated calculations we’re gonna have to rebuild that but that’s that’s a fun challenge I mean obviously I’m biased because I live in it but I think the NHL salary cap system is pretty simple like the ltir piece will put that aside that’s complicated and that’s another area but the basic salary cap system I mean it’s a hard cap that you take the average per year like so the capit doesn’t fluctuate each year you can’t renegotiate other than a buy out like I don’t know it seems pretty straightforward to me I mean there’s work to do the math and the daily how it works like cap space of cruise takes a little bit of time to get used to but it’s way easier than in the NBA with you’ve got exceptions and yes bird rights and all kinds of crazy stuff right different teams are under the cap over the cap eight PRS that seems more complicated no we said the same thing don’t get me started on the midlevel exception in the exactly dead money like forget about MLS Tam exactly the cap and the jigsaw puzzle because we hear from a lot of listener we hear we’ve heard this for years now that you know man I wish we didn’t talk about their salar so much I just want to enjoy hockey uh but it sounds to me like the jigsaw puzzle of the salary cap that’s enhanced your enjoyment of the league in the sport is that fair art I think so I mean just share like growing up at emont like the trades that the Oilers made was the guys were getting too expensive they literally didn’t have the money for them they’d have to ship them off right so you could never dream of like trading for a really good player it was all about like I hope this guy doesn’t get too good and then you have to trade him off you know and then the real change for me was solar cap comes in first trade Oilers trade for Chris Pronger because like they had a Level Playing Field they could pay him the same as everybody else so um I mean for me I think it’s really it makes it more interesting it does put teams in a Level Playing Field the really um High Revenue teams they can’t just go and pay more for players um and so it really adds to the to the puzzle it makes each team really have to work that puzzle to the best that they can and a mistake could really set the franchise back right you can’t just buy your way out of it so I think it’s just like any kind of uh you know game you might play it just ratches up the difficulty level right when you have a salary cap um and yeah I like the puzzle and how the pieces go together like you see teams that are rebuilding and they have lots of cap space and that seems like really exciting and then we’ve seen it can go really wrong quickly if they commit money to the wrong players long term and within a couple years they go from tons of cap space and being involved in cap dumps to all of a sudden they’re the teams team trying to get players off the roster and I think that’s interesting the the fans here are excited because the Vancouver Ks are pretty much in every Market except the goal tending market and you could argue maybe they’re in that as well on from the selling standpoint um do you take a look at the classes like what do you think of this class of free agent for July 1 do you think this is any different a class than we’ve seen in years gone by noting that guys like stamp Co probably never make it to July 1 although we we’ll soon see yeah I mean I think it’s in some ways better like I don’t think there’s like a huge huge Superstar but there’s some really really good players there’s some elite players like the last couple years there really wasn’t much out there um so you know sometimes there was one really like you know paner a few years ago was a really really good one but I’d say we had a lot of like maybe C’s and B’s you know now I think we got a lot of a minuses which I think is really interesting so and then you add in the fact that the cast’s basically been flat for five years so it’s good to see that there’s good players that are potentially going to get big contracts I think back to the NBA a few years ago they had a year where there was a new T the new TV deal kicked in and the the cap jumped like a massive amount and you had play players that most fans hadn’t heard of getting like massive deals and getting paid more than the superstars on the team it soaked up all the money that one summer and then like two years later Superstars there wasn’t any money for them and and so I think this is good in the sense that the Cap’s gone up but not by so much that teams are are have an unlimited amount to span and there’s actually some players available that are somewhat deserving of of decent money deals like a gensel Reinhardt you know even a marshall so an older player like that so yeah I think it’s it’s a good mix of some cap space but not too much cap space available and and a decent crop um for those who aren’t famili familiar with pipedia heart and have been you know had the cap friendly window open for however long they’ve had it open what are the similarities and what are some of the distinctions of your site yeah well I think the the the things that are unique to ppia that I’ve always been really excited about so we’re we’re the only place that has agent information so we show an agent leaderboard ranking all the agents by the either the number of contracts or the money under management and then for each agent we show their Client List I know Canucks fans get a lot of use out of that with looking at milstein’s clients and and some of the agents that have sort of had a oversized influence on the conect also just by how many either how many players they had or like the big many players that they had um so I really personally I find that really interesting and that that gets a lot of um interest because again it’s the only place to find that and I think we forget that these are human beings involved it’s not just like a video game so you your team wants to sign a player sometimes that relationship with the agent is very important like have they done deals together have they had have they had contention before like that yes they have to do what’s in the best interest of their client of course but they’re human beings and that human element comes into what’s going to happen so I I find that part interesting um we have some little things that you might not notice at first but you know I think our our good way to look at it so if you look at a player’s stats like their stats history it’s actually broken down also it shows what contract they were on for those stats so you can kind of look at the history of a player and you can be like how like how did this guy get this contract then you look oh well it’s because the one year before his contract kicked in he had a big year um I I I like seeing that breakdown of the stats with the contract information layed in um little things like if you look at the draft page of players that were drafted you the draft class you can see all the entry level deals and so you could kind of scroll and see how they change as the picks get later and guys that maybe got a better deal than guys picked before them and that’s kind of interesting and then the couple things we recently launched which I’m really excited about um we partnered with Matt Perry who used to be the director of analytics for the coyotes um and he built some really interesting models U so the one is the pick value calculator we often see draft picks getting traded for each other this is a tool interactive tool that you can use you can see how the value of picks compare and you can even take a couple different picks like the 10th versus the 15th and click find fair trade and it’ll add piic until it gets to an equivalent value so you can use that for modeling what trade you might like to see or if there is a trade you can use that to see how the value Compares like we saw that Chicago Islanders trade not long ago it’s interesting to see like the value wasn’t equal so that means that either uh one team has just a different model than what Matt came up with they value picks differently or they just they have another use for the for the pick that they got or they want to use that to move up and down even more they have some other moves coming so I think it’s really interesting for that and then as the offshoot of that is the cap relief model so that’s that’s using um historical trades where players were traded just for pure cap relief so that’s like a third party retaining team or if a player has like zero NHL value and it’s just like a cap pit that is going to be buried in the miners or something what is the expected return for trades like that um and at the trade deadline it was very accurate for especially the third- party retention team so you know a team ended up taking on 500 Grand of Capal space and the calculator expected it to be an you know a late fourth round pick and and that’s what it ended up being so tools like that I think are really cool because it it that’s what front offices are using some version of that and so again if you want to either Daydream of what your team should do or evaluate what they did it it puts you gives you some of the same tools that those that those um teams would have at their disposal yeah and uh one of the other tools that’s occur some price listers over the years I know have taken advantage of is the ASAC capologist yes yes that’s a good point yeah so we have a pretty we built up a pretty good um sort of knowledge database there of CBA and salary cap questions so there’s just some basic things out there and then there’s a whole bunch of people where people submit questions and then I post the answer to it um and you can search through it so yeah that’s a very popular one I remember the like the Luongo recapture I got flooded with questions there’s a whole Luongo recapture article on there um know a lot of them have been inspired by your outrage of certain topics right and then I get flooded with questions yeah I from time to time I get uh notes from them going oh yeah I see your outrage there well just so you know X Y and Z and there should be a drop down menu the conu and the salary cap just a whole separate Wing to the to the site exactly I agree amazing amazing well like I said my friend you’ve been a an extraordinary resource for us uh over the years I I am so pleased that you and the site are getting all this shine that you’re getting this week and we’ll do our utmost to funnel people your way heart because it’s a fantastic product and uh we appreciate all the help over the years including the time here I really appreciate I appreciate all the support over the years and I’m certainly getting you know more attention and support now but the people that have been supportive of me for many years obviously don’t forget that and and it means a lot so thanks again guys thank you you’re good man thank you sir Take Care thank you hey everybody if you’re enjoying what you’re seeing here then follow along with Saron price on YouTube I promise more content coming they call it the kids call it subscribe on YouTube well how about liking it do that as well smash it right now
Hart Levine, the founder of the salary cap website PuckPedia, joins us to talk about how his site will be left standing when CapFriendly goes dark in July. Hart gets into the history of PuckPedia and what got him interested in doing it. He also weighs in on the current crop of free agents, the Vancouver Canucks and the new changes his site has recently undergone.
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