Independence — read this first

Cap & Crease is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to the National Hockey League, the NHL Players' Association, or any NHL club.

NHL and club names, logos, and trademarks belong to their respective owners. They are used here descriptively — to say which players and teams the analysis is about — and never to suggest that the league or any club is involved in this site or approves of it.

Player names, statistics, and images come from public sources, principally the NHL's own public APIs and MoneyPuck. Ownership of that material is not claimed. Every valuation, rating, verdict, and opinion on this site is the author's, produced by his own model, and should not be attributed to any of those sources.

What the numbers are, and what they are not

Everything here is an estimate produced by a model. X-NAV, Player Gravity, STRAND, the GM Audit, and the simulation engine are one person's attempt to price hockey decisions. They are published so they can be argued with, which is the opposite of being authoritative.

The model is often wrong, and it is wrong in ways that are documented rather than hidden. Its uncertainty is measured for some parts, such as contract-price estimates, and not for others, such as a full forecast of a goaltender's value. It is weaker on goaltenders than on skaters, and it cannot see everything a front office sees. Where it is uncertain, the site is built to say so rather than to round the doubt away.

Nothing on this site is financial, betting, investment, employment, medical, or legal advice, and none of it is a prediction of what any team or player will actually do. Do not wager on it. If you make a decision that costs you something because a number here said so, that is a decision you made.

The site is provided as it is, without any warranty. It may be unavailable, incomplete, or out of date at any time. Contract and roster data is maintained by hand and will sometimes lag reality.

Using the site

There are no accounts and no sign-up. The site is free to read and use for personal, non-commercial purposes — build trades, share them, argue about them.

Please do not scrape it, hammer the API routes, or resell the data or valuations. The public endpoints have request limits, and they exist so that one script cannot take the site away from everybody else. Hosting is paid for out of pocket.

The source code is published for reading, not for reuse: it is all rights reserved, and the terms are in the LICENSE file in the repository. Permission may well be given — it just has to be asked for.

Privacy — what is collected

There are no accounts, so there is nothing to sign up for and no profile to build. The one optional exception is the research switch on Beat My Trade challenges, described below, which is off unless you turn it on. No advertising, no advertising networks, no cross-site tracking, and no selling or sharing of data with anyone for marketing. Neither the site nor its author has any interest in who you are.

No cookies are set for visitors. The only cookie this site issues is a signed session for the author's own admin area, and you will never receive one by reading the site.

Some things are saved in your own browser, on your device, and are never sent to the server: an in-progress Cup Run (cup-run-state-v1), saved trade scenarios (nhl-trade-scenarios), fantasy draft board settings and picks (hl:fantasy:settings:v1, hl:fantasy:taken:v1), and Press Box puzzle progress and streak (press-box-state-…, press-box-streak). Clearing your browser storage deletes all of it, and nothing here can recover it.

Beat My Trade challenges add two more browser entries: a research opt-in switch (cc_research_optin) and, only once you switch it on, a random participant id (cc_participant). The id is a random number made on your device, not linked to your name, email or address. It is sent to the server only while the switch is on, and switching it off deletes it from your browser.

The site is hosted by Vercel, which keeps standard server request logs. It also uses two Vercel measurement services: Vercel Speed Insights, which measures page-load performance, and Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views. According to Vercel's documentation, Web Analytics records the page viewed, the referring site, your operating system and browser, and a city and country derived from your IP address (not a precise location). It counts visitors with a hash of the request that resets after a single day, in place of third-party cookies, and does not identify you across other sites or applications. Neither this site nor its author uses it for advertising. These are Vercel services and are governed by Vercel's privacy policy rather than by this page.

The request limits on the public endpoints count requests per address. To do that, your IP address is written into a short-lived counter key — 60 seconds for trade evaluation and simulation, and up to 24 hours for the narrative feature's daily ceiling — and then it expires. It is used to count and nothing else: not stored alongside anything you did, not analysed, and not retained after the counter expires.

The Yes / No buttons under a Trade Machine verdict record your answer, the verdict that was shown, the two clubs, the players and picks in that trade, and the time. No name, address, cookie or free text is stored with it. To avoid counting repeat taps on the same trade, a one-way scrambled fingerprint of your address and that trade is kept for 24 hours and then deleted; it cannot be turned back into your address. The votes are read by the site's author to find verdicts worth investigating and are not used to identify anyone.

The written trade summaries are generated by Anthropic's Claude API. When you ask for one, the trade you built — player names, club names, and the figures the model computed — is sent to Anthropic to produce the text. No information about you is included, because none is collected. Anthropic's handling of that request is governed by its own terms.

Sharing a trade with Generate Share Link does not store it here. The whole trade is encoded into the link itself, which is why those links are long. There is no database of shared trades for these links, and deleting your copy of the link is the end of it. Beat My Trade challenges work differently, as the next paragraph explains.

A Beat My Trade challenge is the exception, because the other person has to be able to open it. When you tap Challenge a Friend, or submit an answer to one, the two clubs, the players and picks in the trade, any assets you mark as required, any short brief you choose to write (plain text, up to 280 characters, shown to everyone with the link, so please keep personal details out of it), the cap and player figures they were scored on, the model's read, and the time are saved on the server and reachable by anyone with the link. Links are not listed or indexed anywhere. Simple events, such as a challenge being opened, the model's read being shown, or a link being copied, are saved with the time and without any identifier. Only if you have switched on the research option is a random participant id saved with them. No name, email, address or free text is ever saved. A challenge stops taking answers after 30 days, and it and everything attached to it is deleted 90 days after that.

Donations — what they are, and what they are not

Donations are handled entirely by Buy Me a Coffee. Payment details are given to them and never reach this site, which never sees a card number.

A donation is a voluntary gift. It is not a purchase, a subscription, a membership, or a contract. It buys no feature, no access, no priority, no influence over any rating, and no service — everything on the site is free to everyone whether they give anything or not, and will stay that way.

Because it is a gift and not a purchase, it is not refundable, and no goods or services are provided in return. This is not a registered charity and a donation is not tax-deductible.

What the money actually does: it pays hosting, database, and API bills, and any surplus goes toward building more of the site. No promise is made about what gets built, or when, or that the site will keep running. It is one person's nights and weekends, and it is honest to say that up front rather than to imply a roadmap.

Changes, and getting in touch

If what this site does changes, this page changes with it. The date below is the last time it did.

Questions about anything here — including a request to use the code or a correction to a player's data — can go to the project's GitHub issues. Security problems have their own reporting route, described in the repository's SECURITY file — please use that one rather than a public issue.