A few years ago, I had what I thought was a neat idea: The red arrow Index, a simple measurement of how many long-term contract commitments each team had. The name came from Cap Friendly, then the most widely used contract tracker, and the way it would use a red arrow to denote any contract that was too long to fit on one screen. The idea was to see what we could learn, and what patterns (if any) we could find, and then revisit the idea annually to track how team approaches changed.
Then I forgot about it. Look, I’m not sure what to tell you, my kids showed me how to use Tik Tok a few years ago and I haven’t had an attention span since that day.
That four-year gap is going to cause a few issues, not least of which is that Cap Friendly doesn’t exist anymore. There are several strong alternatives, including Puckpedia, which I’ll be using today. Puckpedia doesn’t use a red arrow for too-long-to-fit contracts, because they hate fun and whimsy. But the general concept – player signed to deal with six years or more left to run, including this year – remains in place. So let’s see how much things have changed over the years.
