Yet another Brier final for Koe

Team Brendan Bottcher’s Twitter feed is chock full of creative brilliance when it comes to their provincial rivals skipped by Kevin Koe.

Koe has mostly had the Bottcher team’s number, leading to good-natured posts about the frustration in facing off against the four-time Brier champion. Those posts even returned in the fall, despite Bottcher beating Koe to win last year’s Brier title.

At the 2022 Brier in Lethbridge, four-time Brier champion KoeKo has now defeated Bottcher twice and is into Sunday evening’s final. The latest win came in the Page playoff 1 versus 2 game.

Earlier that day, the wounded Team Gushue came out on top of a thrilling match against Colton Flasch’s Saskatchewan, setting up a Bottcher versus Gushue semifinal for Sunday afternoon.

Koe said his win over Bottcher “definitely wasn't a classic” given a number of missed shots, but that a strong start for his team allowed them to control the game.

“The ice got a little trickier tonight,” said Koe.

“I just think there was more misses, and you know, with more misses, more points. But we were going to put rocks in play anyway.”

Koe had leads of 2-0, 5-2 and 8-5 en route to the 9-7 victory.

The 47-year-old pointed out that his recent series of wins over Bottcher doesn’t mean his team can count on yet another victory if they play Bottcher again in the final.

“They weren’t playing great in the first half of the year, so I think you can throw that out the window,” said Koe. “Brendan’s playing good now. Obviously they’ve had some—I don't want to call it turmoil—but some changes, and they’re just rolling a little better now.”

Bottcher said that in longstanding rivalries between top teams, either one can get on a short winning streak, but those come to an end.

“I’ve probably played Koe close to a hundred times in my life—or at least it feels that way,” said Bottcher. “So you go through stretches where one guy wins a few and then another guy wins a few. And you know, they’re playing great, so all credit to them.”

Bottcher said he is not planning any changes in strategy when he takes on the reconfigured Gushue team.

“I think we played them similar to our normal strategy yesterday,” said Bottcher, who edged the three-man Gushue squad in the first playoff round on Friday.

“We’ve just got to go out and execute it as well as we can, and if we do that I’m confident we can win.”

Meanwhile, Bottcher’s Twitter feed is executing a new round of pre-game trolling …