In curling you seldom see a high performance curler switch teams during the season. Transactions mostly occur after the year, when the curling season has been completed. However shortly after the 2021 Canadian Olympic Curling Trials in Saskatoon, there was a change made to the Brendan Bottcher curling team that won the 2021 Tim Hortons Brier in Calgary.
Bottcher announced that he would no longer have Darren Moulding as his third effectively immediately. Moulding was to be part of the 2022 Tim Hortons Brier in Lethbridge as part of the Bottcher team, representing Team Canada, as the defending champion.
Bottcher has not named a new third to his team, but we now know that Moulding will be joining the James Grattan team out of Oromocto, New Brunswick according to Devin Heroux of CBC Sports on Wednesday. Moulding will be the third for Grattan, while Paul Dobson has dropped down from third to second. We do not know at this time if Andy McCann or Jamie Brannen will be the primarily lead.
Grattan has been a fixture at the Brier over the last two decades. He has represented New Brunswick 13 times at the Canadian men’s curling championship. Grattan’s best two finishes were in 1997 and 2002, both times in Calgary, where New Brunswick finished third. In 1997, Grattan was a skip, and in 2002, Grattan was the third for Russ Howard.
