A brief 2025 Scotties preview

A look at the two most important teams

The Scotties start tonight, so let’s start with the bad news: I’m not previewing every team in the field. If you’re looking for that, I’d recommend this piece from the Calgary Herald’s Todd Saelhof.

To me, the 2025 Scotties is all about whether Team Homan can win it. After posting one of the most dominant two-year runs in the sport’s history, this event is simply Homan vs. Everyone Else.

So instead of an in-depth look at each team, let’s preview Everyone Else as one entity to start. Because there are two reasons Homan is in such a strong position:

1. The main one is that Team Homan is really good.

2. The other, more subtle factor, is that Everyone Else has been on a steady slide as the current version of Team Homan has emerged.

For example, here are the number of Canadian teams in the DoubleTakeout.com women’s top ten at the conclusion of the past eight seasons:

2018: 7
2019: 6
2020: 5
2021: 4
2022: 4
2023: 4
2024: 3
2025: 2

At various points, these teams included skips such as Jennifer Jones, Casey Scheidegger, Chelsea Carey, Tracy Fleury, and Val Sweeting. All of those ladies are either no longer active or have joined Team Homan or Team Einarson. Throw in the uncertainty around Team Einarson, the most realistic challenger to Homan, and the rest of Canadian women’s curling is possibly as weak as it’s ever been.

I don’t have the historical perspective to know where Homan ranks in terms of dominance heading into a Scotties. But there can’t be too many cases of a team being considered a bigger favorite to win. Maybe Colleen Jones at her peak. Maybe, but I don’t think so.

Yet while Team Homan is the obvious favorite, the simulations using my ratings give them “just” a 61.5% chance of winning. Here are the full projections:

For one of the most dominant teams in the history of the sport, that doesn’t seem very high. Various Canada-based sportsbooks have Homan as a -250 favorite to win. That implies a 71% chance. Which means Homan doesn’t have better than a 71% chance otherwise the sportsbooks are giving away money. Either way you look at it, there’s still a decent chance Homan doesn’t win. I’m guessing a bigger chance than most people think.

If this were still the round-robin format of the Canadian Championships, then Homan would be a much bigger favorite. But thankfully there are playoffs, and Homan will have to win at least one elimination game - and though it’s unlikely, possibly up to four - to win the Scotties. The most difficult opponent would be #6 Team Einarson, whom my ratings gives a 22% chance of beating Homan. That figure is in line with the 2-6 record Einarson had head-to-head against Homan over the past two seasons of Homan’s dominance.

In last year’s Scotties, Homan didn’t face much stress in going unbeaten in winning the title. It may have been the most dominant run in Scotties history. (Again, lack of historical perspective, etc.) Homan trailed just once entering the ninth end of their 11 games.¹ That was in the dramatic 1-2 game against Jones which required an extra end steal to avoid having to play two elimination games to win the title. It was the only game in the event where Homan gave up a steal. Instead, it was just a rematch with Jones in the final.

2024 Scotties results for Team Homan

Another mostly uneventful, undefeated run is one possibility this year. But the point of this brief piece is that the best teams at their peak are not as invincible as they seem. The best estimates indicate that Team Homan has about a one-in-three chance of getting knocked off. There won’t be any suspense as to whether Team Homan makes the playoffs, but once they get there, they’ll still have to avoid the kind of off-game that is possible even for one of the best teams in the history of the game.

1. They actually led entering the ninth end of every game except two: the 1-2 game vs. Jones and the 1-2 “championship round” game (which I am considering playoffs for purposes of this piece) against Jill Brothers in which they were tied 3-3 with hammer entering the ninth.