Philadelphia Flyers GM Danny Brière brings binders of printed salary and personnel information with him on road trips, ready to review player details at a moment’s notice. But now, there’s an app for that.
Since December, the NHL has been rolling out the SAP-NHL Front Office App, which provides organized access to player, team and league financial data. Its release comes amid a burgeoning arms race for salary cap tools and sophisticates.
Previously, teams culled info from a variety of custom and shared applications as well as league-distributed emails and PDFs. Many insiders also relied on third-party platforms like CapFriendly, which the Washington Capitals acquired last year reportedly in part out of concern that another club would gobble it up first.
The new app has three main sections. A league view shows each team’s current and upcoming cap situations, with alerts for moves, customizable player watch lists and details on conditional future draft picks. Team views dig deeper into athlete deals. Lastly, a player view includes additional information such as game logs and transaction history.
While the concept of a salary cap sounds simple—don’t spend more than a certain amount each year—each sport league’s system includes various exceptions and technicalities.
Data provided in the NHL app ranges from space available to compensate replacements for players dealing with long-term injuries to tracking performance bonuses, which can allow a team to spend slightly over the cap. NHL COO Steve McArdle said the app is roughly 18 months in the making, with one of the goals of the projects being to “as much as we can, kind of unplug the need to go outside and source information from third parties.”
Part of the development included restructuring the way central registry information is pushed out.
“We kind of attacked it from both sides, like, what are the end users’ needs, but then how do we build the right plumbing to feed what the end users need?” McArdle said.
SAP previously helped the NHL digitize game statistics, track venues’ carbon footprints and hand coaches real-time data during games via an iPad app. Pittsburgh Penguins coach Mike Sullivan has said the app has evolved the way he manages players’ minutes and faceoff assignments. The global enterprise company is not officially involved with the NHL’s consumer-facing apps, which drew criticism following a 2023 relaunch.
It remains to be seen what impact giving GMs mobile access to player and team financial data will have on the game. SAP VP of global sponsorship Dan Fleetwood said he hopes any analyst who currently needs four monitors to keep tabs on his or her roster will now be able to do so on an iPad—or even an upcoming iPhone version.
At the very least, the centralized app seems poised to make the increasingly complicated job of NHL general manager slightly more manageable.
“When you’re talking to a GM and you’re trying to make a deal and facilitate a deal; having everything right in front of you will make it a lot simpler,” Brière said.
