The Hockey History Archive (HHA) is a hockey history organization that is part of HHA Grading and Reclamation (BC Business Registry 725858229bc001) which began as a group of hockey historians and collectors who initially were focused on finding and releasing to the public video of old hockey games 20 to 70 years old. Recently HHA began focussing on providing a new type of hockey card grading with collectors in mind rather than investors. HHA was founded by RD Smith who has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University and who worked for years with historic photos for museums which included assessing, cleaning, and preparing historic photos for public viewing while taking needed steps crucial to preserving cards. Smith in conjunction with the HHA decided to turn this expertise towards the productive end of grading and "reclaiming" cards in an environment that has been dominated by PSA and Beckett who have policies in place that are actually harmful to cards and card collecting in general, such as their absurd policy against card cleaning -- museums regularly clean artifacts including photos etc in order to restore and preserve the artifacts by removing dirt and bacteria that can expedite the decay of artifacts. HHA seeks to put an end to the frequently biz arre and even more frequently arbitrary practises of modern grading companies. *Yes* you want to make sure cards are cleaned in a professional way and that harm does not come to the cards in the process of cleaning etc, but leaving dirt and bacteria on cards is insanity from a preservation perspective.

Companies like PSA also do not ensure their graders are historically literate and certainly do not educate them in artifact cleaning and preservation standards that pretty much all museums observe. PSA actually penalizes people for doing the responsible thing with cards and will even refuse to grade cards if they have been cleaned and prepped for grading by a museum expert in historical artifacts. PSA et al are not historians and they are not museum curators and it shows in almost every aspect of how they operate. Their grading standards are not only historically illiterate but are harmful to cards as artifacts. 

The Hockey History Archive offers historical/hobby grading and reclamation and is registered as such by the BC and Canadian government. HHA is NOT an investor grading company which requires an online database which can be expensive to maintain, but as HHA focuses on collectors not card investors/flippers we do not have to maintain such a database which saves money and allows us to pass that saving on to the customer. We employ professional grading practises and our graders are all historically literate and experienced in museum quality analysis and preservation standards.

HHA has an entirely different philosophy regarding how cards should be graded and why. Cards are graded to give the collector a general idea of the condition of the card, particularly when purchasing cards online but also in terms of assessing your own collection and its value for, perhaps, insurance purposes, but our grading is done using the naked eye and our policy is that the difference between a card graded a 9 and a card graded a 10 should be immediately apparent to the collector using the naked eye. We have had teams of experts looking at 9 and 10 graded cards by PSA and the experts were almost always unable to ascertain why cards were given certain grades. 

Anybody who buys raw cards online labeled "NM/MT" knows that this is a very unreliable hit/miss process, you may get a card that grades at 8 to 10 but just as often or more often it can end up being cards of mixed conditions grading at 7 or lower by PSA. Part of our reclamation card sales is designed to give a more reliable assessment of cards that a collector is buying but which is done so at about 1/4 the price of companies like PSA and Beckett, meaning lower value cards that are still cherished and collectible and finally able to be graded and slabbed by experts at an affordable price. We are taking guess work out of buying "raw" and lower valued cards by buying raw cards for you and then grading them and selling them at a fraction of the cost you would pay through PSA et al.

Please note that while grades 7 through 10 are easy enough to understand, we do not number cards less than 7, we simply grade those G/VG etc and let you decide. G/VG does not mean the cards are not collectible at all, it just means it did not make the 7 threshold which is where we believe cards in very high collectible condition begin. 

Don't be fooled by low end start ups offering cheap alternatives while having no training or expertise in cards. HHA's founder is a lettered historian with museum experience and we seek to make sure all our graders have similar backgrounds.