On the Old Quad, the New Squads, and Paying the Bills
It's the last mailbag of the season!
Hello curling fans! It’s been over a month since I last sat down to write a newsletter, and I apologize for that. My intention was never to make this a SUPER regular thing anyway, but a lot of things happened in the last few months that made for very interesting newsletter topics. Now we are safely into the curling offseason (minus the World Juniors) and so I figured I would close the “year” by doing another mailbag. People seemed to really enjoy the first one, so we’ll answer some questions about the year that was and the year ahead, and you may not hear from me again for a little while as we all enjoy our summer vacations from the sport (which are shorter and shorter all the time). Here we go!
Ok Leo has a billion questions here. Rapid fire:
McEwen has a team and either reading my newsletter on the men’s changes or seeing some of my tweets and replies to people asking about it should help you out.
Not touching the Russia or China questions (this newsletter is free, that’s way above my pay grade, which is $0).
Junior “prodigies” are almost all based on a few things: one, having a team around them to support their ability to be good, and two, a willingness to stick with the sport. I’ve touched on that before, but as curling continues its march towards complete and total professionalization, young curlers are going to have to decide a lot earlier if the sport is for them. We’ll lose some prodigies in the process. We are also going to need to see top men’s and women’s teams be more accepting of younger players onto their rosters. We’ve just undergone yet another quad shuffle that saw approximately two new players shuffled into the mix of top teams. We’re gonna lose a ton of great seconds and leads if we keep it up.
Top moments for me this year? It’s tough. This year was so insane that it was tough not to get swept up in all the drama of the Olympics, the team changes, the Bottcher thing, the emotions we saw from teams at the end of it all. But I’d have to say my top 3 are probably:
3. Braden Calvert with the most unlucky miss of the entire season at the Best of the West. Lying 2 and trying a double for 5, he somehow managed to thin off of his own and hit the exact crotch of the 2 he was lying to give up a steal of one. It’s a shot you couldn’t make 10% of the time if you were trying it. You can tell by my reaction in the clip even I didn’t know what to say.
2. Jocelyn Peterman’s two insane shots against the USA at the World Mixed Doubles. To not only make both of those, but both in the same game is absolutely absurd, the second one in particular. I’d rank that one shot as one of the best of this century so far.
1. The Olympic Gold Medal Game. I think it’s one of, if not the, best curling game ever played from a shotmaking perspective. It’s not often a single game can cause an entire country to go into panic mode, but watching the clinic Edin and Mouat put on there put Canada on notice.
Residency rules will change this quad. When, I don’t know, but they will. There are way, way too many top curlers who want it to not see it happen. I think the basic answer is it’ll move to two imports allowed per team.
I also enjoyed the SGI Canada Best of the West! It was particularly special for me since I commentated it and had a front row seat for the whole thing. While I’m not sure we’ll see a national U30 anytime soon, I do love the initiative by Matt Dunstone, Dustin Mikush, and Rylan Kleiter (and the whole team) to get it off the ground. As I noted above with my junior prodigies comment, we need to find a way to keep young curlers playing. They need carrots. This is one of them and the committee went above and beyond for the curlers to make the event feel special (and the purse wasn’t bad either).
As someone who played their whole career in BC behind a Jim Cotter rink that won provincials 7 out of the 10 times I made it there (and I was under 30 for 6 of those years), the opportunity to get to go to an event and put the BC jacket on would’ve been massive for me. It would’ve been huge for a couple reasons:
1) the honour of it. Of course. I curled competitively for 20 years, made it to provincials 11 times, have 7 medals, won a slew of WCT events, and had relatively little to show for it. Zero BC titles, zero BC jackets. I made it to one Grand Slam ever (and it was the Tier 2 event), never got close to the Trials, and was held back from the Brier by one great team. I think the BOTW committee putting the teams in the provincial jackets was the most important decision they could’ve made. It’s a huge honour for curlers and you think of young curlers in Saskatchewan who were behind Rylan Kleiter and BC who were behind Tyler Tardi and Corryn Brown getting to don those jackets and it means a lot.
2) making connections. As we can see, curling in Canada is increasingly becoming a nationwide game, and getting to know the other curlers around your age around the country will be incredibly important from a team-forming perspective. Getting to put yourself on the curling map while also potentially winning some cash and wearing your provincial jacket is a beautiful idea.
Really interesting mix. I’ve heard some people say to me they’ll be the quietest team of all-time and it might hamper their ability to be an elite team. I’m not sure I agree. Seeing Kevin Koe towards the end of this quad clearly frustrated with the barrage of info he was receiving from his front end, he might rejoice in a situation where he is clearly the number one top (Ku)dog, who can make all his own decisions. Tyler has all the shots and has proven he’s ready for the step up. Thiessen/Martin have a Brier and some Slams and a slew of silvers. They can play too. I’m fascinated to see how the personalities all mesh but I think it could be a really good situation for everyone involved. One thing you always hear from people is how good of a teammate Karrick Martin is, and I wonder if he ends up being the crucial glue here.
Loved the doubles rule changes. 6 rocks should be the standard moving forward. Promotes gender equality in the game and makes for much more interesting ends that might actually eliminate your second concern.
Talked about McEwen above. Epping also has a team, and I’m not really sure why they haven’t announced yet (or McEwen, for that matter). Can’t reveal Epping’s team though we know it’s already with Mat Camm and I can say there might also be some other familiar faces to John involved.
Ranking teams will be a wonderful way to get me in a huge amount of trouble but I will say that I think Bottcher, Dunstone, and Gushue in no order are the clear top 3 going into next season. I think Bottcher got better and he’s one year removed from a Brier win, Dunstone’s team is so well-constructed curlers are moving out of Manitoba to avoid playing him, and if you had to lose Brett Gallant, going from him to EJ Harnden is about as lateral of a move as you could possibly make, and there aren’t too many "lateral moves” when you’re talking about losing a player of Brett’s calibre (you could also maybe even make the case EJ’s experience and age being a bit closer to Brad/Mark might make the chemistry mix a bit more effective and the move could be a net plus).
Yes.
Yes. Not sure. No.
In a bit more elaboration, most elite teams do get along off the ice. In some cases it’s a closer bond than others, but it’s rare you’ll have an elite team where any of the players hate any of the other players. Sometimes after a long quad, like any long-term relationship, you have some friction that forces some negative feelings, but when teams are formed, it’s almost never with the thought in mind, “well I hate this person, but I’ll play with them anyway because they’re good”. At the very bare minimum, professional relationships are strong and they can develop into very legitimate friendships (which is a reason why you see things like Ben Hebert and Marc Kennedy continuing to find ways to play with each other, or Brad Gushue and Mark Nichols playing together for 25 years, etc.)
As for JJ, Kaitlyn wanted to skip and they’ve been together for a very long time. That team was finished regardless.
It can happen both ways. Usually it’s the skips that lead the dance, as there are only so many elite skips and a slew of curlers who want to play with them. I would say that for the elite teams that (mostly) only change every 4 years, you generally have a good idea as a player heading into that fourth year whether your team will be done or not at the end of the season. If you think your team might be done, then you might send feelers out to other players and see where things are at on their teams and where you might be able to fit in. The last thing you want is to be left without a seat at the table, so often the team breakup comes last, as you want to be sure you have something set before you leave.
Usually it’s the Brier/Scotties that are the tipping point, as teams are often reluctant to decide before then (the Team Canada berths can be a real complicating factor and it can also be hard to compete at the highest of levels if you know your team is finished), but then once it’s over, things get wild. Matt Dunstone alluded to that in a few interviews, saying that the “72 hours following the Brier were hectic”. What that suggests to me is that his team hadn’t decided they were done until post-Brier, and then their Brier didn’t go great, and so the team ended. But that can mean that Matt/whoever wanted it to be over without actually saying it. It’s possible Matt was deciding on his new team in the wake of the Brier ending and a deluge of texts before telling his guys that he was leaving them, because the team staying together also wasn’t a bad option for him (I have no idea—this is just an example). Team Koe on the other hand, told Sportsnet their team was done well in advance of the Brier. So it just depends.
Dunstone breaks through, that team is too good not to. What’ll be interesting to me this quad is if we see this sorta next tier of junior players (Horgan, Sturmay, Tardi) start to establish themselves. Obviously Tyler is playing with Kevin Koe so that helps, but it’ll be put up or shut up time for Karsten and Tanner, as both will remain skipping and we’ll need to see if they can get into that Dunstone level or not for the next next quad.
My guess is they try both and settle on Tracy calling the game and throwing third. Rachel can throw the big weight more consistently and has that killer instinct to finish off big games we haven’t seen from Tracy. I also wonder if not calling the game unlocks a super-powered version of her. I know Rachel loves sweeping and it could be something very special if the mental pressure of calling the game being gone helps her throwing game.
I’ve heard they have a new lead. In other, unrelated news, I’ve also heard there’s a new, mystery Swedish superstar lead named Johan Küllen who has totally legal and not at all forged documents and is ready to take the curling world by storm.
Yes. I also think Curling Canada gives serious thought to the idea that those Wild Cards are declared before the provincial playdowns to get some of the top teams out of the provincials and encourage more grassroots participation.
Ok last one! I have talked about this a little bit before, but am happy to get into a bit more detail. Now, I should clarify that I did not play at an elite level as the truly top teams do, where sponsorship dollars are massive and there’s different factors at play, so I could be wrong here but this is based on my experience and what I have heard over the years.
Every team I played on had an even, 25/25/25/25 split. I would say that most teams also operate under this system as well. Over time, the money in an imbalanced split isn’t THAT much larger to justify the potential heartache/power imbalance that would come with a skip making more.
For example, let’s say a skip takes 40%, cutting the other three teammates down to 20% each. If a team makes $100,000 (and there are not even 10 teams of each gender who make this much), you’d say “well, $20,000 is a lot of money, so that’s worth it.” Well, that doesn’t factor in expenses. In a normal, non-COVID year, the average top curling team spends around 75-100k. So let’s say your team makes $100,000 and your sponsorship is $50,000. And let’s say your expenses are right in the middle at $87,500. So the total team take-home is $62,500. That would mean the skip makes $25,000 and the other 3 team members make $12,500. Is the team strife really worth an extra $12k? Not to mention the grief of knowing your team won $100,000 this season and you only got $12,500 of it? Probably not. And then filter those exact numbers down to teams that are taking home MUCH less than $62,500 a year and it gets even sillier to imagine why you’d pitch that.
That said…there are likely some elite teams where the skip takes a larger cut. This is not a new concept either, there have been teams since the dawn of time with this arrangement. Skip makes harder shots, it’s their name up on the scoreboard, therefore, they make more cash. It’s not an insane thing when you compare curling to other sports, but it’s unlikely there are many teams that do this.
Another thing that can factor in: who brings in the sponsorship money. If you have a team of 4 where one person is responsible for 90% of the sponsorship dough coming in, you might see a scenario where they get a little bit of a larger cut. Again, not a common arrangement, but one that can happen.
As for team planning, it’s usually just one person on the team who enjoys doing those tasks (or at least is the most organized) that does it. Unpaid position, tons of work. I know, because I did it for my team a lot. It wasn’t all that fun. We actually ended up having a coach who thrived doing those sorts of tasks in my last few years, and so in addition to being our coach, took care of all the admin stuff. It was glorious. Thanks, Brett. ;)
And as with anything else, I can guarantee you every single curling team has at least one person on the team who doesn’t do a single administrative task, much to the chagrin of everyone else on the team. Don’t ask me why that is, it just is.
Finally, any top curler will tell you that super spare is the best possible position to be in. You don’t pay for the entry, you don’t pay for your travel/accoms, if it’s a top team, you’re probably not paying for meals or drinks either, and whatever you win, you get 1/4 of. Why do you think Matt Wozniak played an entire year just doing that?
Alright, thanks everyone for all the questions. Hope you enjoyed this newsletter and if you did, hit the subscribe button up in the top corner to get this delivered to your email every time it comes out. And you can follow me on Twitter at @cullenoncurling for my quick takes on the game. I can’t say a lot yet but…some exciting things coming up for me this fall, which will be announced in due time on my Twitter so be sure to follow along. Can’t wait.
Thanks John, great read! Looking forward to next season.
Always a great read John. Very thoughtful and knowledgeable. Have a wonderful summer. Looking forward to your exciting news. Cheers!