On the Burning Questions for the 2024-25 Season: Men

As promised, here is the second instalment of the questions we must ask ourselves ahead of the 2024-25 curling season, this time for the men’s side of things. There’s a lot of intrigue out there, especially with some of the lineup shifts, and we’ll take a look at the things I’ll be keeping an eye on this season.

Men’s

• How will Team Jacobs look?

This is the burning question to end all burning questions. Team Bottcher was very, very good the last two seasons. Last season they won 3 events, made the finals in 2 Slams and lost the semis in 2 others, and they came third at the Brier. Oh, and they spent a portion of the season at #1 in the World rankings. However you feel about Brendan Bottcher, he is one of the best last-rock throwers in the world, and this is a change that we almost never see in Year 2 of a quad from a top-ranked team. You usually don’t see lineups change at all among top teams, but if they do, it might be a front-end player in or out. It’s almost never the skip.

Making this move right now to bring in Brad Jacobs has some inherent risks. On paper, Brendan and Brad are a lot closer than you’d think. Brad obviously has that all-important Olympic gold medal, but he still only has the one Brier title (same as Brendan) and Brendan has more Brier finals. Brad has more Slams, but it’s only 7-5 and three of those wins were before Brendan had really figured out his team’s best lineup and was regularly in all of the Slams.

I believe everything Marc and Ben are saying about the fit, about the culture change, about the attitude shift. It’s clear they didn’t think it was going to work with Brendan. They wanted to get their swagger back. And obviously Brad is one of the finest last-rock throwers the game has seen this century. That doesn’t make the pressure any less.

Brad started this quad taking half a year off and then throwing third stones, citing not really wanting the pressure of throwing last anymore. He had some nice success with Team Carruthers last year throwing last and it’s clear it’s his best position, but he’s really in the fire now. A lot of focus has been put on Marc/Brett/Ben dumping Brendan, but it was also a really tough situation with Brad leaving Team Carruthers behind too. The added drama, the time crunch to get the team chemistry right, and the fact that most of the other top men’s teams did not change and have a 1- or 2-year head start on them? It won’t be easy. But it’ll be fun as hell to watch.

• Will the real ________ please stand up?

This was a question last year for the women’s side of the game, and it feels very relevant to the men’s side this season. Outside of Joel Retornaz, Yannick Schwaller, and Ross Whyte, every team coming over from last year’s top 10 or so men’s teams has some question marks surrounding uneven 2023-24 seasons. Brad Gushue won the Brier, finished second at the Worlds, and won the late-season Players’ Championship, but before that, it was one of his weaker seasons in recent memory. He missed the playoffs in a Slam for the first time in a long time and didn’t even make a Slam final until the Players’. Sure, his overall record would be the envy of most teams, but when it comes to Brad, you can only compare him to himself, and the results were a little worse and more inconsistent than we are used to seeing.

Niklas Edin stacked up his 7th world title, but his tour season also left something to be desired, not winning a single event, missing the playoffs outright at 2 Slams, and finishing with a 66% winning percentage, which would be among his lowest for a full season. Bruce Mouat won a whopping 6 events, but couldn’t find the podium at Worlds as the defending champion and there was an argument they shouldn’t have even been there given they finished third at the Scottish Championships behind Ross Whyte and James Craik. They also missed the playoffs at 2 Slams. Obviously Teams Jacobs and Carruthers have new lineups and so question marks are automatically built in, though I must admit I like the fit for Reid with Catlin Schneider–he’s bounced around a bit the last few seasons but the shot-making ability is inarguable and he very quietly finished in the top-5 stats-wise as a skip at the Brier last year with a young team ahead of him.

Mike McEwen was another team that had a big finish–second at the Brier and a semifinal finish at the Players’ to secure a 2025 Brier berth–but was still figuring things out throughout the year, missing the playoffs at a few Slams and a few of the big-name Tour events like Lloydminster and Dundas. They’ve started this season with a win in a competitive field at the Saville Shoot-Out, but can they keep that up? Matt Dunstone also didn’t look quite right after their fantastic first season as a team, coming 4th at the Brier and not making it out of a Slam quarterfinal. Can they rebound this season? And Kevin Koe had the Brier of nightmares, looking like he didn’t want to be there after about Game 3 and slumping to a 2-6 finish, leading to lots of rumours this offseason that team was finished. They aren’t, but this season will be a real indication of whether there’s life left there for a Trials push or not. With teams like Michael Brunner, Marco Hoesli, and Marc Muskatewicz making early season pushes already, we’ll see how these teams respond.

• Is this the year we have a Slam playoff with no Canadian teams in it?

This has been a weird, and at times strangely xenophobic, question on the minds of Canadian curling fans for a while now, but this year seems more likely than ever that this could be possible. As of this writing, only 3 Canadian men’s teams are firmly entrenched in the top 10–Gushue, Jacobs, and McEwen. Reid Carruthers is hanging onto 10th with Matt Dunstone and Kevin Koe in 11th and 12th, respectively, but Reid is only 5 points up on Marco Hoesli in 13th and the international threesome of Craik, Shuster and Muskatewicz are only 20 points back of them. All told, there are only 6 Canadian teams in the top 20 and with all the teams from 10 to 20 only separated by 50 points, it’s possible to imagine a scenario where we get to the January Slams and there might be 5 or less Canadian teams involved.

With 8 teams making the playoffs and Canada still having a handful of the best teams in the world, it seems unlikely that the entire Canadian contingent of teams in any given Slam would miss the weekend, but it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility, which is something we wouldn’t have been saying even 5 years ago. Countries like Switzerland, Scotland, and the United States are starting to stack up multiple good teams, and the one-offs like Joel Retornaz, Niklas Edin, Marc Muskatewicz and even Wouter Gosgens are maintaining their competitive edge. I think it’s still unlikely that this year is the year, but it’s hard not to peek towards the end of this quad with so many of the Canadian teams having players that are likely retiring or at least taking a step back and so many of these international teams being quite young that this reality is coming sooner rather than later.

Tap-Backs: It was a question on our minds last season too, but will this be the year that Korey Dropkin usurps John Shuster for good? He’s got the one US title under his belt back in 2021, but that was also a COVID-affected year that pushed the championships back to May. Shuster has mostly had his number otherwise, be that at US Nationals or Olympic Trials, but Dropkin continues to inch ever closer, both in World rankings and in their matches against one another. And of course, “The Ghostman” Danny Casper lingers in the background as well with a slightly new-look squad. It’ll be a tight race with Dropkin only 11 points back of Shuster and Casper only 40 points back of Korey…It’s been 11 years since Benoît Schwarz won an international title, the 2013 Euros. Since then, it’s been an awful lot of bronze. Only one Slam victory too, and that was 6 years ago. With Team Schwaller off to a phenomenal start to the year and putting the heat on Brad Gushue to push into the top 3, is this the big breakout year a lot of curling fans have waited for?…who is going to win Alberta? After losing their grasp on the free berth back to the Brier at the last second, Team Koe will be heading back to their provincials for another tangle with Aaron Sluchinski, who had their number last year, beating them comfortably in the final, and they have improved the lineup with the addition of Kyle Doering. That’s to say nothing of the decent competition below the top 2 as well, as the new van Amsterdam rink, which usurped a few former BC champions in Sterling Middleton and Jason Ginter, will be competitive, and young teams like Cole Adams and Johnson Tao will look to disrupt as well…how many first-year Brier skips will we see this season? Shaping up to be a lot of wide-open battles in many provinces. Can Owen Purcell finally get over the Matthew Manuel hurdle in Nova Scotia? Jordon McDonald looked awfully good at the Manitoba provincials last season and has already started this season with a trip to the Saville Shoot-Out finals and a U25 NextGen win (while being one of the youngest teams in that field). Reid Carruthers will be the favourite and Braden Calvert is hanging around, but McDonald put a scare into them both last season. Will Rylan Kleiter go all the way now in Saskatchewan considering that Mike McEwen isn’t standing in his path, or will veteran squads like Kelly Knapp or Steve Laycock wield their experience like a hammer? BC is as wide-open as it’s ever been and while Brent Pierce and Jeff Richard have been to The Show as skips before, the best skips underneath them like Glenn Venance and Cameron de Jong have not (Glenn has been to a Brier, but this is his first year behind the tee-head). And perhaps most interestingly, who wins Ontario? It’s Scott Howard’s first year playing skip full-time and he will definitely be the favourite, but Jayden King had a phenomenal provincials last season and a quick scan of the world rankings will show that Sam Mooibroek–super-charged with the addition of sharp-shooting Ryan Wiebe from Manitoba–is actually the highest-ranked Ontario squad currently. The pre-clinched Wild Card berths are doing exactly what they were supposed to and next February should get extremely exciting.

And there you have it! Lots to ponder for next season and with most teams already into their seasons, it’s going to be very fascinating to watch it all unfold over the course of the year. As I promised last newsletter, I’ll also have some exciting news to announce coming up, so stay tuned for that and I promise I won’t forget about this newsletter either. It may not be every 14 days or so like the last few seasons, but it’ll still happen, I’ll still do my famous mailbag issues, and we will still stay in touch.

Thanks as always for reading and subscribing and we’ll see you very soon.