While the absence of NHL player-contract website CapGeek “has been felt around the hockey community" since the death of its founder, Matthew Wuest, in March, recently “new options have popped up for anyone who wants all things salary-related at his or her fingertips,” according to Amalie Benjamin of the BOSTON GLOBE. Just one week after its first tweet, and “without any apparent attempts at publicity, General Fanager had already amassed 11,715 followers.” Meanwhile, Hockey’s Cap has “built a sleek website with an ‘Armchair GM’ feature, as there was on CapGeek, and which General Fanager intends to add.” As part of a relaunch, NHLNumbers.com is “beefing up the salary section.” Each of these sites are “reactions, homages, even ways to honor Wuest.” They also are “necessary for understanding the intricacies of an NHL team.” Nation Network Managing Editor Thomas Drance, whose company owns NHLNumbers.com, said, “CapGeek.com was the most significant act of hockey journalism of the last decade.” General Fanager Creator Tom Poraszka said, “Any site that is doing this and claims not to be kind of inspired by CapGeek or worked on because of what happened with CapGeek is probably lying.” Poraszka estimated his time "at 40-60 hours per week on General Fanager in addition to his job as product manager for an automotive website.” He said that the site is “already seeing 4,000-10,000 users per day.” Unlike Drance, who is a columnist for Sportsnet, neither Poraszka nor Jamie Davis, who created Hockey’s Cap, "is a journalist by trade.” The sites are “not yet perfect” and there “are glitches.” There also are numbers that “aren’t quite accurate,” but the “bigger issue will be how the sites continue to update themselves with new contract information” (BOSTON GLOBE, 6/2).
