NHL Franchise Boys

Matthew Wuest was a hero to math-challenged sports writers. When he started a website called CapGeek.com in 2009, hockey reporters could hardly believe it was true. You mean, all you have to do is click on this website and scroll to your team, and the salaries of players will all be perfectly arranged as to their implications to the overall team cap? Wuest, a former reporter with Metro Halifax, died of colon cancer on March 19, 2015 at age 35. He disbanded CapGeek.com shortly before his death, and the site lives on only in archived form. For several weeks, there was no place to go for hockey people to explore the increasingly relevant world of salary-cap information.

Enter Tom Poraszka, who wants to carry on the legacy of Wuest with his site GeneralFanager.com. Since May, Poraszka’s site has become a leading go-to source of information of the kind that CapGeek provided. It has every team’s payroll broken down player by player, along with future season contract implications for each team. Poraszka, a tech engineer from the Toronto area, was just one of the many frustrated, diehard hockey fans who thirsted for the information Wuest provided. What better way to get it than to do the same thing he did?

“When CapGeek went down, there was just such a void of information,” Poraszka said. “Anytime you have an argument about a player’s worth, the cap information becomes so vital. I didn’t think my site would take off, because I thought the NHL or the NHLPA would take over and was surprised when they didn’t.”

Actually, the NHLPA website lists every player’s salary. But it is only for the current season, and there is no team-wide list. The NHL’s website does not list any salary information.

Poraszka, who says he is averaging more than 10,000 unique visitors a day and expects that to increase more as the hockey season starts, hopes to add more interactive features to his site and wants to better educate his visitors about the collective bargaining agreement. It’s much more complicated than the average fans thinks, he said, pointing out a couple of offseason trades. “When Chris Pronger was traded by Philadelphia to Phoenix for cap reasons, a lot of people got it wrong. And when Sam Gagner went to Philly as part of the deal, a lot of people didn’t realize he went to Tampa Bay first, and they picked up part of his salary, so the cap numbers a lot of people reported at first were wrong,” Poraszka said. “We were able to verify the correct numbers.”

Poraszka said he has made professional contacts with many agents, general managers and NHL beat writers since launching his site. That is crucial, he said, in getting ready information that is correct. “So many of those people have reached out to me. They want a site that is accurate and dependable. Most of them don’t have the time to compute it all into a large database,” Poraszka said. How many hours is Poraszka putting into Generalfanager.com, apart from his day job? “Probably 40 hours a week,” he said. “I probably will put some ads on the site to try and make ends meet. Otherwise, this is a labor of love.”

Thanks Tom and keep up the great work!