The Saga of SQRA

In 1994, the NHL was looking to modernize their statistics system. They received over two dozen proposals to digitize their pen and paper system but they wanted to leapfrog from the old to the new technologies.

The solution came from within the League as George McPhee from the Vancouver Canucks discovered a new system called SQRA Hockey developed by a Huntsville, Ontario, Canada firm, SQRA Sports Software.

After a live scoring demonstration to Commissioner Bettman and VP Public Relations Arthur Pincus during the 1994 playoffs in Buffalo and a subsequent presentation to the NHL's full management team, the NHL and SQRA agreed to integrate SQRA as the NHL's new scoring platform and subsequently to build a business with other leagues and other sports.

In 1996, the NHL co-ventured with IBM to modernize their sports information system that incorporated SQRA as the scoring engine for the NHL Realtime Scoring System (RTSS).

By the 2022-23 season, SQRA had scored 31,500 games, 83,000 goals, 25 million player shifts and 1.5 million hits. In a few more seasons, SQRA will have scored over one half of all NHL games ever played.

This is the story of SQRA from idea to implementation (1991-97) and the 200 people who made it all possible.

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