My life status is changing. My wife was able to take early retirement and in conjunction with that I have decided to join her in retirement (or at minimum semi-retirement) life. So that means some changes to TheStanleyCap.com.
The Background
When CapFriendly.com shut down a few years ago I began to think about whether I wanted to take a stab at creating a replacement. I enjoy building things so after some thought I decided why not, lets give it a go. My goal was not necessarily to create everything that Cap Friendly did, but rather to create a website that had most of the contract and salary cap information fans want, plus some statistics and analytics. I wanted to do this so that fans will have long-term access to this valuable information and not have it disappear when someone gets hired by the NHL. This was also a project that I figured I could continue into my retirement years. All I needed was for TheStanleyCap.com to provide enough revenue to cover operating expenses plus a little extra as compensation to make my time and effort worth while.
As of today, while there are enough supporters to cover costs (thank-you to all you who have contributed) there isn’t enough revenue to make it worth my time and effort to continue the day-to-day maintenance of the site. Day to day maintenance isn’t a huge task but to do it in a timely fashion it’s kind of like being on-call 24/7 which is far from the retirement life I desire. In short I have concluded that building TheStanleyCap.com was an enjoyable, challenging project while managing TheStanleyCap.com is a job and currently an unpaid one at that.
My Decision
So, that brings to today where I am making a decision that for the most part I will no longer maintain TheStanleyCap.com on a day to day basis. That means I won’t be updating promotions, demotions, IR/LTIR moves, roster/lineup changes, etc. That means team salary cap numbers and lineups are not longer accurate and up to date.
I do plan, for the foreseeable future, to leave the site up and running. I may end up hiding some of the features that are no longer up to date/accurate and I’ll probably open up the few paywalled portions of the site. I do plan to continue to entering new contract data as it might feed into some other hockey research projects I may decide to do. Contracts may not get updated daily, but rather maybe every few days or when it is convenient for me.
If you are currently a subscriber, first let once again say thank-you for your support. Second, I’ll be terminating your payment subscriptions but I will keep your benefits active for as long as the site is up and running.
Is This the End of TheStanleyCap.com?
Maybe. Maybe not. I am considering a few options.
- Just shut it down.
- Sell it if anyone wants to buy it and operate it.
- Hand over day to day operations if someone (or a group of people) want to take it over ensuring it is up to date and accurate. Under this scenario it would become more of a community maintained site. I’d help out but it would largely be up to the contributors to keep it updated and accurate.
- Open source all my code and database so anyone who wants to start their own site can.
With the right people managing the site I think it could be far more successful than it was under my management. I think the foundation is there for a great website, it just needs the right person or people to maintain, grow and promote it. If you are interested in any of options 2-4 please reach out and we can discuss options. You can send a message to the feedback e-mail address found at the top of any TheStanleyCap.com page or reach out to me on BlueSky or Twitter.
What about Puckalytics.com
Nothing will change with Puckalytics.com right now. My expectation is to keep it up and running and will make enhancements when I get motivated to add a feature or do some research projects, much like I have done for the last few years. If anything saying goodbye to TheStanleyCap.com probably allows me up to do more analytics/research projects.