The Hart Trophy goes to the NHL’s most valuable player. Fittingly, the MVP of NHL fans, media and general managers has the same name.
Maybe that’s high praise, but Hart Levine’s website, PuckPedia, saved the hockey media world two years ago.
For years, NHL fans — and some front offices — relied on CapFriendly for all of their league-wide contract information. It showed the term and value of every contract, along with each team’s cap projections and a number of other pieces of key information. It was the go-to resource for anyone wanting to keep track of the numbers, whether for work or recreation.
In the summer of 2024, the Washington Capitals ruined it.
Their intent was to gain a competitive advantage by hiring the folks who ran the site to their hockey operations team. As big as the opportunity was for Jamie, Ryan and Chris Davis, the brothers behind CapFriendly, it threw the rest of the hockey world into a state of frenzy.
Was there another way to get contract information, or would everyone have to manually keep an Excel sheet with all the available contract info and update it over time?
Levine and PuckPedia quickly surfaced as the answer.
PuckPedia had already existed for six years by that point. It had all the info and even more tools than CapFriendly, but it had always taken a backseat for the majority of hockey folks.
Levine had always felt akin to a talented AHL player waiting to get called up to the big league and show the world what he had.
“It was just a realization like, ‘Wow, we have an opportunity right now,’” Levine recalled of hearing the news that the Capitals had bought out his competition. “... I just had been working so hard to get to a certain point. I just thought, ‘I don’t want to squander this opportunity where we finally are going to get a chance.’”
Levine had recently mapped out his goals the next year and a half of the site’s growth — adding new features and such — but at that moment, he decided to pour every available resource into implementing everything at the same time.
“We got all that done and and then and then a lot more as well,” he said.
Accuracy is paramount to PuckPedia’s credibility, so Levine and his team put great effort into obtaining information — often through sources they have cultivated over nearly a decade in the industry. Because teams and agents rely on the site as much as anyone, many of them are quick to send over their contract info as soon as it’s official.
It often results in PuckPedia having contract details before traditional insiders even catch wind. On the opening day of free agency this year, the site beat everyone else to countless signings, but accuracy is more important than speed.
“That’s the most important thing to us, is that we’re the most accurate, trusted place to get this information, and everything we do is always through that lens,” Levine said.
“We never want to compromise that, and we just have to make sure that as we build out things, we don’t get distracted from ultimately our core, which is being the most accurate and trusted place to see this information.”
Over time, the site has grown to include a variety of tools to keep up with the league. The idea is for every fan to have the resources to feel like an NHL general manager. Among other things, it includes:
- Explanations of every salary cap rule
- Transaction trackers
- Agent information
- GM trackers
- Lineup projections
- Organizational depth charts
- Scouting tools
- Draft info
- GM simulator
- An AI assistant
- A hockey podcast
- Hockey trivia games
Fans, media and team staff wondered if they’d ever recover from CapFriendly’s disappearance. Now, they wonder how they ever made do without the wide scope of tools that PuckPedia provides.
