After 79 years of using paper and pens to help explain a complicated game getting more complicated by the season, the National Hockey League’s scoring system is going digital. The NHL and IBM Corp have formed a joint venture company called NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises, or NHL-ICE. It will provide a real-time scoring system for scorers to record hits, face-offs, goals, shots and the like, and plot their exact location on the ice and who did what to whom on their IBM laptops linked to the game clock. The New York City-based company will also set up a digital library of photographs, articles, audio and video clips and enhance league’s web site next month to include more live cybercasts of games, and later on, merchandising and access to the information collected by the scoring system, once it’s up and running. Finally, coaches and players will be able to use data mining techniques to query the data compiled by the scoring system, which is built on software licensed from Brockville, Ontario-based SQRA Corp, starting from the forthcoming season. League commissioner Gary Bettman claimed hockey was the most global game in the world, but another NHL official said less than 20% of the hits on its web site, www.nhl.com came from outside the US and Canada. The NHL is obviously hoping IBM’s scoring system works better in the cold of an ice rink than the results system did in the heat of Atlanta.
