Sports fans are accustomed to knowing their favorite athletes’ salaries. Practically every major professional sports league has beat writers assigned to cover every team, doing the mundane work of reporting, tracking, and analyzing salary information for every player.
Although it’s easy to take this for granted, the availability of this information wasn’t always a given. But with professional sports under a perpetual media microscope and reams of information freely available online, it’s become a given that every player’s contract information will be made public at some point.
At least one professional sports team isn’t fighting it anymore.
The National Hockey League’s St. Louis Blues on Wednesday launched a microsite featuring every player’s salary information, displayed on a spreadsheet through the 2028-29 season.
Some pro teams now announce players’ salary information with their standard press releases announcing new contracts. But no major North American professional teams have displayed that information on their own website in this manner before.
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At best, it’s a user-friendly tool that allows fans to engage with player salary data — for years, the substance of water-cooler debates over who’s underpaid and who’s a bargain.
The Blues might be alone in their willingness to publicize a player salary table on their own website for now, but it’s possible that other teams will make it a trend — in the NHL, at least.
Every sports league has reputable online sources for player salary data; Spotrac.com is something of a clearinghouse for this data in several leagues. The most popular player salary sites in the NHL have a more interesting history than their counterparts in the other major North American pro sports leagues.
Founded in 2009, the NHL-focused website CapGeek.com pioneered the data-viz format now featured on the Blues’ microsite. Over the next six years, CapGeek established itself as the authority for the then-30 team league.
But the site shut down abruptly in Jan. 2015 when its founder, Matthew Wuest, faced a terminal illness. Three months later, it was reported that Wuest had died of colon cancer. The site effectively died with him.
CapFriendly.com picked up the torch, copying CapGeek’s user-friendly format. It too became a reputable clearinghouse for salary data — so reputable that the Washington Capitals purchased the site in 2023. Suddenly it was gone, too.
Although somewhat limited in its scope, the site HockeyReference.com also borrows the data and format of CapGeek and CapFriendly. Now, with the Blues launching their own site, it has a chance to raise the bar for a popular point of fascination for hockey fans in St. Louis and beyond.