Sports fans are used to knowing the salaries of their favorite athletes. In virtually every major professional sports league, there are sportswriters assigned to each team who do the mundane work of reporting, tracking and analyzing each player’s salary information.

Although it’s easy to take it for granted, the availability of this information hasn’t always been there. But with professional sports under constant media scrutiny and vast amounts of information freely available on the internet, it’s become a given that every player’s contract information will eventually become public.

At least one professional sports team is no longer fighting it.

The National Hockey League’s St. Louis Blues launched a microsite on Wednesday that displays all players’ salary information in a table through the 2028-29 season.

Some professional teams now disclose their players’ salaries in their standard press releases announcing new contracts, but no major North American professional team has previously disclosed this information in this manner on its own website.

At its best, it’s a user-friendly tool that gives fans a chance to delve into player salary data that has been the subject of coffee-machine debates for years over who’s underpaid and who’s a bargain.

The Blues may be the only ones currently willing to publish a player salary chart on their own website, but it’s possible that other teams will make it a trend – at least in the NHL.

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 NHL’s most popular player salary sites have a more interesting history than their counterparts in the other major North American professional sports leagues.

Founded in 2009, NHL website CapGeek.com pioneered the data visualization format now found on the Blues’ microsite. Over the next six years, CapGeek established itself as an authority on the then 30-team league.

But the site was abruptly shut down in January 2015 when its founder, Matthew Wuest, suffered a terminal illness. Three months later, it was reported that Wuest had died of colon cancer. The site essentially died with him.

CapFriendly.com took up the torch and copied CapGeek’s user-friendly format. That site, too, grew into a respected clearinghouse for salary data – so respected that the Washington Capitals purchased the site in 2023. Suddenly, it, too, was gone.

Although somewhat limited in scope, the website HockeyReference.com also uses the data and format of CapGeek and CapFriendly, and now that the Blues are launching their own website, it has a chance to raise the bar on being a popular attraction for hockey fans in St. Louis and beyond.