Grand Slam of Curling: Team Edin looking for more as the Tour Challenge gets underway

If you see Niklas Edin as the rabbit in men's curling to begin the 2015-16 season, he doesn't agree with your assessment. Edin's 2015 World Champions might well be the team with the target on it as the season's first Grand Slam event gets underway in Paradise, Newfoundland & Labrador. The way the 30-year-old skip sees it, that world crown only means he's keeping up with a couple of Canadian powerhouse teams.

“We need to (go up) a couple of notches in the world rankings and really try to compete against McEwen and Jacobs,” Edin says during a break in action at last weekend's Stu Sells Tankard, in Oakville, Ontario. The reigning world champ might have that trophy on his mantle, but he and his teammates are looking to jump from number three in the world rankings to number one and those two rinks from Manitoba and Northern Ontario are in the way.

“We’ve gotta make sure that we get enough points to stay high in the world rankings and make all the slams,” Edin says, standing outside the Oakville Curling Club in shorts and sandals, the humidity-laced Southern Ontario heat being pushed into the upper thirties on this day.

With 32 women's teams and 28 men's teams taking part, the Tankard served as a rather high quality tune-up, if you will, for this week's Tour Challenge, one of two new events added to the Grand Slam of Curling schedule for this season. Edin's crew - including third Oskar Eriksson, second Kristian Lindström and lead Christoffer Sundgren had just come off the ice after a close-shave loss to the Jim Cotter rink, on the way to an eventual quarter-final loss to the team that would win the championship, Team Brad Gushue.

Like everyone else, Edin and his mates have their eyes on Olympic gold, in 2018. The road to South Korea is more than two years long at this stage and it is one that has the reigning Olympic champions (Brad Jacobs) and the world's top-ranked team (Mike McEwen) trying to hog all the lanes.

That's part of the reason why Edin and his curling pals will spend some four months of the season in Canada, living, practicing and competing from their home-away-from home apartment in Ottawa. They'll play at the Tour Challenge and they'll play a few more events before heading back overseas on the eve of the European Championship, in November. Then, they'll come back to Canada.

“None," says Edin when asked what bonspiels he might be missing back home. "We don’t have an event in Sweden.”

“Slams here are definitely vital for our season," he continues, taking note of the expanded schedule. "If they can make a couple in Asia then we’ll try to play them as well. But, it’s always gonna be Canada because all the good teams are here as well.”

There has been talk about holding a Grand Slam event overseas in the future and Asia seems to be the best bet for any expansion plans. Europe - particularly Switzerland - has been the subject of those whispers in the past, but it seems the high cost of holding an event there has that notion on a back burner if it is on the stove at all.

The Tour Challenge - with 60 men's and women's teams taking part in a two-tiered event (tier one winners get a berth in the season-ending Champions Cup while the tier two winners get a spot in The Masters, in October) marks an earlier start to the Grand Slam year. Edin likes the lengthening of the schedule - even on this scorcher of a day - and can envision even more curling in the future. At the very least, he doesn't believe there is too much curling on the schedule now.

“I don’t think so," he says. "If you look at the tennis, that’s pretty much all year around and most sports are becoming all year around and I think that’s good. That’s the only way you can make it professional. If the season’s only half a year, you’re pretty much forced to have a job on the side and you can never make it a professional sport.”

Having said that, Edin and his team took full advantage of the summer and only returned to the ice for a grand total of two practices before they went out and won the Baden Masters in late August, knocking off Peter De Kruz, Thomas Ulsrud and Tom Brewster to win the title.

"I don’t think that the three months off hurt at all," Edin says. "You need two practice sessions and then you’re into it.”

Actually, Edin's team had little choice but to stay off the pebble. “We don’t have ice, so that’s not an option. It’s too expensive back home,” he says, adding that that's just coincidence.

“Even if we had ice, I would choose not to practice in the summer.”

The notion of summer shooting is an overdone one, Edin claims, at least for his team. “Yeah, I would say so," he says.

Hard to argue with the template Edin and his team have put together. Hard to argue with their success, although they want even more. Looking to close the gap on Brad Jacobs and Mike McEwen, Team Edin gets a chance to go toe to toe with them at the Tour Challenge only if they all climb into the playoffs, with each of them being plunked down into separate pools for the round-robin portion.

The world champions are not resting on their laurels. Their quest for the top rung on the men's curling ladder is only really just beginning.