Playoff whiff a first for Jones

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This article was published 21/02/2019 (1890 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SYDNEY, N.S. — The ending looked the same, in the way great curling disappointments always do. They have a familiar pang, and while Jennifer Jones has won this thing in every possible way, she’s lost it in every way imaginable, too. So what else could she do? Shake hands. Hug the kids. Gather the brooms.

What was different at this Scotties Tournament of Hearts is when the ending came. Fourteen times has Jones’ Manitoba crew come to the national women’s curling championship, and each time burnished her legend a little more: six golds, three silvers, three bronzes. Even on her very first try in 2002, she finished fourth.

But never before had she missed the playoffs. Over the years, she reached the final games from all directions: cruising into the 1-vs-2, sliding into 3-vs-4, or slugging it out in a tiebreaker. But the one thing she never did was miss out altogether.

Well, first time for everything. Because on Friday afternoon, with her playoff chances already dangling by a thread, Jones came up miles light on her last draw against Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville. When the rock stopped, the defending Canadian champion had fallen 8-6 on a 10th end steal of one.

It was her fifth loss of the week, eliminating her from playoff contention. (She still had to go back to the arena at night to finish things up with a 5-4 win against British Columbia’s Sarah Wark.)

“I’m pretty disappointed,” Jones said moments after the loss. “It’s one of our favourite events. We really thought if we won two today, we might have a chance. It’s just not the way we wanted to end the week, but, it just was one of those weeks where every time we threw a rock, it seemed to not quite work out.”

That 10th end missed draw was a dramatic way to fall out, but it was not, truth be told, the game-killer. Even if Jones had made the shot to tie the game at 7-7, she’d still have gone to an extra end without the hammer. If the team had been as dangerous this week as they so often are, maybe that still would have gone in their favour.

But Jones, third Kaitlyn Lawes, second Jocelyn Peterman and lead Dawn McEwen hadn’t been at their best in Sydney. It’s not that they were consistently awful — their Thursday loss to Rachel Homan had some spark — but they were always a little off-kilter, and a little too much guessing at weight.

“As much as (media) made it out that we played bad, we weren’t that bad,” Jones said with some conviction. “We were just, couldn’t quite make that precise shot. We’d roll like an inch too far, instead of rolling perfect. So I’m not terribly disappointed with that, it’s just hard to not be in the playoffs.”

For Jones, one silver lining is it was a week of hard-earned honours. In Sydney, she was named Canada’s all-time greatest skip by a TSN panel; longtime former second Jill Officer and lead Dawn McEwen were similarly honoured.

On Thursday afternoon, she tied Nova Scotia icon Colleen Jones’s record of 140 all-time wins as a skip; with that anticlimactic win over British Columbia on Friday night, she set a record of 141. Even if Jones never returns to the Scotties, which seems unlikely, it’ll be years before anyone else comes close.

When will she be back? That’s a fun thought. Fans will be in for a show, when the 2020 women’s provincials roll into Rivers, Man., next winter. Jones will be back in the mix; so will Manitoba’s Kerri Einarson and reigning Manitoba champ Tracy Fleury, plus the usual slate of hotshot up-and-comers ready to give the top seeds a run for their money.

But that’s then, and this is now. There is still a national title to be won here in Sydney, and four teams looking to do it. Alberta’s Chelsea Carey seized top spot, and will face surging Saskatchewan skip Robyn Silvernagle in the 1-vs-2 Page game; after a nearly unbeatable season, Homan slid to the 3-vs-4, where she’ll face McCarville.

Everything about this Scotties has been exquisitely strange. It’s hard to know what to make of it. It was a campaign where some of the sport’s elite looked just that little bit off their game, while lower seeds and relatively untested teams dealt slews of surprising upsets and threw tons of pressure.

Why does that happen? Well, for one thing, the ice at Centre 200 — home of the QMJHL’s Cape Breton Screaming Eagles — was a constant question mark. Fans are understandably skeptical when losing teams mention the ice; but most of the top skips in Sydney, even as they won, mentioned it as a hurdle at least once.

And here’s something to consider: ice that straight can even the playing field. It has a way of dampening the elite teams’ rarest and most potent weapons, such as their high-precision bombs. The world’s best curlers build their strategy around having those shots in their quiver, where many of their opponents do not.

So if you take those weapons away, if you give them ice that can’t quite let them bring their real woebedazzlers out to play, what happens?

Contrast some of the games between top seeds at last year’s Scotties in Penticton, B.C. Curlers loved the ice there, which was joyfully swingy; it’s no coincidence that when Jones and Einarson met in the 1-vs-2 game, they used it to mount one of the most eye-popping shooting displays in recent memory.

So far, no games in Sydney have been nearly that thrilling, even in a more star-studded field. Houses have been messy, and there have been more memorable misses than highlight-reel hits. The straight ice just wasn’t very much fun to play on, Jones said; if nothing else, she would have liked to throw fans some entertainment.

“We just couldn’t find a way to figure out the ice,” Jones said. “We talked about it. We tried. We practised. We thought about trying to throw it a little bit differently to try to get little bit more movement. But at the end of the day, sometimes it’s just not meant to be… and it’s okay.”

“I’m not going to go home and lose sleep and wonder what went wrong,” she added. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

So that’s it for Manitoba’s once-bright prospects at the 2019 Scotties. Three provincial teams started the week, and sitting as they were at second, third and fifth in the Canadian rankings, they had justifiably high hopes. But one by one, they fell out: Einarson in the wild-card game, Fleury in a round-robin tiebreaker, and then Jones.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca