Should Curling Canada change the rules around blank ends?
Impact of a lose-the-hammer penalty again the subject of debate in the sport
Brendan Bottcher and his Alberta-based teammates were unofficially curling's Blank-end Kings long before arriving at the 2024 Montana's Brier.
They excel at creating blank ends, preferring to clear the house and put “0” on the scoreboard rather than surrender their last-rock advantage for a measly, single point. Their shotmaking skills have led to some low-scoring, unexciting games and reinvigorated one of curling's oft-debated questions:
Should a team that blanks an end lose last-rock hammer in the subsequent end?
It may be a divisive issue among curling aficionados, but Bottcher is OK with the idea.
“I'd be fine with it,” Bottcher, the 2021 Brier winner, said during the Canadian men's curling championship at Regina's Brandt Centre. “Like anything else, it would just change the strategy and the tactics of what we do.
“I think we have a really good formula with the rules now. But you know, we've transitioned through a lot of rules here in the last couple decades, going from three-rock rule to four-rock rule to five-rock rule to no ticks. The strategy evolves as we go.”
A three-time Brier champion with three world titles and an Olympic gold medal on his resume, Brent Laing is coaching Saskatchewan's Mike Mcewen-skipped rink at the event. Laing is onside for assessing the impact of a lose-the-hammer penalty for blanking an end.
“I would like to see no blanks,” said Laing. “It's a completely different game. I don't know if it's the answer for the Olympics or Brier, but I'd like to see it tried.”
Curling has, indeed, tried to evolve as technology and skills have improved. Former Canadian champ Russ Howard, now a TSN curling analyst, devised the free-guard zone in the early 1990s and bonspiel-tested it before the rule was officially adopted by Curling Canada. Maybe years ago the game should have made the simple switch to penalize hammer-wielding teams that blank ends, rather than implementing the free-guard zone and ensuing modifications that Bottcher listed.
“People got too good at peeling, so they needed to have the freeguard zone,” said Curling Canada's CEO Nolan Thiessen, who won three Briers and a world championship as a player.
“People got too good at ticks, so they needed to remove that a little bit. I sit on the competition rules commission for the world curling and we talk about things all the time. We've got to find some testing grounds to try things out.”
Thiessen said the curling world is more interested right now in speeding up the game, much like Major League Baseball did recently, to make it more appealing. They're looking at ways to get shots called and delivered more quickly. But there have meanwhile been attempts to see if curling would be better served by a no-blank rule.
“People have tried it and
reports are awful,” said Thiessen. “It makes it worse. You have absolutely no incentive, when you don't have hammer, to engage. It actually lessens the amount of offensive play when you do that.
“(Blanking is) their opportunity to control the scoreboard, to say, `I'll take the blank end and live to fight another day.' There have been various events (that have experimented with no-blank rules). I know that Peter de Cruz's team over in Switzerland were telling me they tried a whole event with it and they said it was awful.”
Thiessen also added this reminder: “All blanks are not created equal.”
Totally true. Teams rarely start an end looking to blank, but situations and strategies change rock by rock.
“There aren't too many blank ends,” said back-to-back Canadian champion Brad Gushue, who also won an Olympic gold medal and is vying for his sixth Brier title. “Every time we try to blank, we never do it.
“For us, it doesn't work. This is coming from Bottcher. That's part of their game, part of their style and they're very good at executing it. It's a style of game and it benefits their team. How do you punish it? I don't think you need to.”
So let the debate continue. Anyone with other opinions or suggestions is free to fill in the blanks.