In the name of full transparency, one franchise in the National Hockey League has decided to make the details of its player contracts easily available to the public on its website.
The St. Louis Blues launched a new microsite on Wednesday that features the complete salary information of each player on its roster. That’s also displayed prominently on a spreadsheet that lasts through the 2028-2029 season.
This information wasn’t necessarily hidden before, as there are many reliable news information websites set up that has it all listed. Each NHL team has a team of news beat writers who follow and report on the team, including details of player salaries and contracts.
Until now, though, all of that information was compiled individually and wasn’t necessarily provided in one clear, concise format directly from the professional sports franchise. But, the Blues have decided to do something different and provide that information straight from the source.
In doing so, they have become the first major professional sports team in North America to display player salary and contract information right on their own official website.
What the Blues are exactly trying to accomplish with this website is unclear at the moment, although it’s quite possible that other professional sports franchises could soon follow suit.
Until this point, people who were interested in seeing what individual player salaries were — or what a team’s salary cap situation might be — had to go to independent third-party sites.
Spotrac.com has been a great one that includes loads of player salary data for most sports teams. CapGeek.com was founded back in 2009 and was focused just on that information for NHL teams, until it shut down abruptly in 2015 with founder Matthew Wuest facing a terminal illness.
He passed away unfortunately only three months after the site shut down.
CapFriendly.com launched not long after that, following the easy-to-use format that CapGeek pioneered. The site was so successful that one NHL franchise, the Washington Capitals, purchased it last year, but that site was then shut down.
HockeyReference.com is another site that has popped up to provide some of this same information, though it doesn’t have as wide of a scope as its predecessors did.
All of this may have led the Blues to decide to buck the trend and launch their own site in the model of CapGeek and CapFriendly to provide the information that so many fans and members of the public want to see.
It will be interesting to see where this project leads both the Blues, the NHL and the professional sports landscape in North America at large.
Will more leagues follow suit? Is this a transparency project, first and foremost, or do the Blues have a plan to try to monetize it somehow? Is this something the players themselves, and as a result their unions, will like and support?
No matter what the answers to those questions prove to be, it’s clear that the Blues are trying something groundbreaking.
