Shribman: AI comes to hockey, but romance remains

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. The work being done here is changing the world of sport.