MONTREAL — In a classic start-up setting — in a former textile plant four miles from where the first hockey match was played a century and a half ago — a group of high-tech computer engineers are changing Canada's most revered pastime.
There — in sterile cubicles amid lots of wood and windows, with a jelly-bean dispenser and the inevitable dog, all planted in a gentrifying Jewish section of Montreal where Mordecai Richler set his landmark 1970 novel "St. Urbain's Horseman" — they examine the 4,000 motions they detect players make in the course of each 60-minute game. The result is millions of data points unavailable to fans in the stands, but indispensable for coaches and, ultimately, players.
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