It's Time for the NHL to Create Its Own Public Salary Website

In one effortless stroke, the NHL could achieve multiple objectives. With a single decision, the league could please its fans, ensure accuracy in reporting on the game and team decisions—all while solidifying its ability to bypass traditional media and market itself directly to consumers.

That’s the nutshell argument for the league building its own publicly accessible salary website.

Money has always played a much larger role in sport than leagues like to admit publicly. Back in 2015, Commissioner Gary Bettman dismissed the possibility of the league building an official website, making the indefensible argument that fans don’t (and probably shouldn’t) care about such things.

“I don’t think it’s a resource we need to provide because I’m not sure fans are as focused on what players make as they are about their performance on the ice,” he said, per Yahoo’s Greg Wyshynski.

The trouble is that the decisions NHL teams make are incomprehensible without that data. Teams have always made personnel choices based on dollars, but in a salary-cap world, every decision that every team makes factors in the money. Without an official NHL resource, fans have flocked to unofficial tracking sites.

Earlier this week, the still-unnamed NHL expansion team in Las Vegas announced that it had hired Tom Poraszka to a front-office job. Poraszka was previously the owner of General Fanager, the leading public resource for team and player salary information.

With his hiring, the site has ceased operations, but fans looking for that information have multiple choices, from old standby NHL Numbers to relative newcomer Cap Friendly and to the multi-sport Spotrac. That’s before even getting to more all-purpose websites such as Hockey-Reference, a site whose functionality exceeds the league’s official site in many ways. One of those ways is the provision of salary information on teams and players.

The proliferation of cap sites proves that there’s widespread interest in the information. It also reinforces the blatantly obvious truth that the NHL can’t keep this data out of the public realm, however much it might like to do so.

This past September, Bettman relented on the topic of fan interest but still argued that the league shouldn’t be the provider of official information. As per Postmedia Network's John Matisz:

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There may be [avid fan interest]. But we don’t think that we should be the authoritative source on what our clubs are doing with their player contracts. That’s a club decision. There are obviously sites that speculate, but none of them have confirmed information. We think it’s fine the way it is.

"

Matisz infers that there are individual clubs still pointlessly and ineffectually fighting to keep this data private, and he’s undoubtedly right. Those would be the same teams that end news releases on new contracts with “as per club policy, terms were not disclosed.” Such a disclaimer keeps exact terms under wraps for all of the five seconds it takes TSN's Bob McKenzie, NHL Network's Elliotte Friedman or some plucky beat reporter to put that news out themselves.  

It’s a silly thing to do in an era in which major-league teams can address their supporters directly, bypassing the gatekeepers in traditional media.

On the digital side, the more indispensable the league’s official site becomes, the better off the league will be. Not only does the NHL make money off advertising, but as fans become more reliant on the official site, the league will have increased ability to influence the narrative surrounding it. Additionally, with newspapers everywhere struggling, the need to self-promote has never been so acute; gaps are showing in traditional coverage that individual teams need to fill.

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

This is why the league put an enhanced-statistics section on its redesigned main website, a decade after such details were being provided by third parties. It’s why the Los Angeles Kings have an in-house reporter with his own website, a site that has quickly become a critical source for information about the team. It’s why multiple teams now stream press availabilities, rendering write-ups in print hours later superfluous.

There are obvious incentives for the league to build its own salary website, and the crazy thing is that it wouldn’t even take much work. The NHL and NHLPA, after all, already track all this data. In 2015, McKenzie wrote that they maintain an internal website with functionality exceeding that of the various public websites that deal in this kind of information:

With the advantage of real-time updates and the official stamp of the league, a public version of such a website would quickly dominate the competition.

There isn’t any downside to putting that kind of site together. People want salary breakdowns, and the information is all out there, anyway. And the upside—clear and correct information, satisfied readers flocking to the league’s official organ—seems undeniable.

So why hasn’t the NHL done this already?

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.