To sweep, perchance to dream… of records

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2016 (3803 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Ontario’s Ed Werenich shot a sizzling 90 per cent at the skip position in winning the 1990 Brier, a mark that stands to this day as one of the most enduring records in all of Canadian curling.

Or at least it used to. Because with four skips shooting 90 per cent or better through the first eight draws here at the Brier this week — including Manitoba’s Mike McEwen clocking in with a slick 93 — the only question still to be answered isn’t whether Werenich’s 26-year-old record will be broken this week, but rather how many skips will break it.

In a sport where just about everything that could happen has already happened, this year’s Brier is breaking new ground with record-breaking shooting percentages at every position.

Consider:

The best team shooting percentage ever posted in the history of the Brier is 90 per cent. As of Tuesday afternoon, six of the 12 teams in this field were shooting 90 or better.

Three players have already shot 100 per cent in a game this week, while seven more have posted 99 per cent performances.

Good players are posting great percentages, while great players are posting otherworldly percentages.

Ponder this: John Morris — a three-time winner of this event and an Olympic gold medallist — had a career shooting percentage in nine previous Briers of 86 per cent. This week, he’s shooting 92.

Veteran Ontario third Richard Hart has a career average of 86 per cent at the Brier. This week, he’s shooting 93 per cent.

And then there’s Newfoundland skip Brad Gushue, who has a career average of 83 per cent through 12 previous Briers and yet is somehow shooting 91 per cent this week.

So what gives? How did everyone get so good so quickly at an event where change over the years has always come incrementally and painstakingly slow?

The answer appears to be sweeping — a perfect storm of technique and technology coming together at the same time as elite curlers have reached levels of fitness never seen before in curling.

Let’s start with the technology. Dramatic improvements over the past 18 months in the fabrics used in broom heads have made sweeping wildly more effective than its ever been before — so good, in fact, the governing body of the sport had to ban the most extreme versions of the new brooms earlier this winter lest every club curler in Canada start shooting 90s.

And then at the same time as that’s been going on, a new technique called “directional sweeping”` has taken over the sport that has combined to make the new brooms even more effective.

Mostly gone are the days of two sweepers pounding a rock all the way down the ice, replaced today with a vastly more refined technique that sees a lone sweeper scrub one side of the rock or the other, depending on whether the objective is to have the rock curl more or curl less.

Add to all of that the swollen biceps and triceps of your average front end these days and the old line about ‘sweeping to concrete’ is now nearing a practical reality.

Has the Brier become too good for its own good?

Scott Pfeifer, who won four Briers with Randy Ferbey and is coaching Alberta this week, wonders if his old team would be nearly as successful today in an environment in which sweeping has levelled the playing field, rendering the art of calling the right shot and hitting the broom less important and giving lesser teams a greater margin for error.

“I really wonder how many titles we’d win today,” said Pfeifer.

It’s a legitimate question. Consider: The Ferbey Four, widely regarded as perhaps the best men’s team ever, posted their best team shooting percentage at the 2004 Brier when they shot 88 per cent.

That same number would rank them eighth in this week’s Brier field.

Now, a couple of caveats.

First, it’s worth noting that many regard this year’s Brier as the deepest field ever assembled for a Canadian men’s curling championship and so it probably only stands to reason that the level of curling would be unusually high.

And second, the teams that are atop the leader board and shooting the highest percentages this week are still the same teams you see in those positions every year at this thing — the Jacobs, Gushues, Howards, Koes and the rest.

Sweeping may have made the bad teams better, but the good teams are still the best.

Where it all goes from here depends on a race between the fast-moving companies making the new sweeping technologies and the bewildered governing bodies of the sport trying to reel it all in.

A curler’s ability to hit the broom with the right weight has always been the single most important factor in winning or losing.

What this Brier has proven is that may be changing — and more quickly than anyone ever imagined possible.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek