from Lyle Richardson of Spector's Hockey,
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman doesn’t believe hockey fans are interested in salary information regarding teams and players. He couldn’t be more wrong.
Since the NHL imposed its salary-cap system nearly a decade ago, there’s been growing interest among fans regarding the cap payrolls of NHL teams and of the salaries of each player. Given the financial implications for teams when signing free agents or acquiring players via trades or waivers, salary data is worthwhile information for die-hard hockey fans. It provides a better understanding of the limitations in building and maintain rosters. It’s also invaluable for participants in fantasy hockey, especially those which use a salary-cap system.
It’s easy to simply dismiss these fans as merely a nerdy number-crunching sub-set of NHL followers, just as it was to mock those who tracked those supposedly weird-ass puck possession stats with funny names like Corsi, Fenwick and PDO. Except now those “fancy stats” are called analytics, which the league has finally fully embraced by posting puck-possession numbers (albeit with different names) on its site. A growing number of pundits and commentators now cite analytics in their coverage of the game.
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