If Bruins don’t pay Jeremy Swayman, it will torpedo their season originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
For three years, the Bruins rostered two of the best goalies in the NHL. Right now they have neither.
If this was Don Sweeney’s plan, then to quote Black Widow’s little sister: “Your plan sucks.”
The Bruins opened camp on Thursday with neither Linus Ullmark nor Jeremy Swayman in net. They traded the former in order to hand the keys to the latter while yeah-yeah-yeahing away one tiny detail: Swayman’s a restricted free agent. And it turns out negotiations aren’t going well.
WEEI’s Rich Keefe reports that Swayman wants $10 million a year and the Bruins aren’t willing to pay him more than $8 million. That sounds surmountable if you follow baseball, where $8 million gets you a good middle reliever, but it might as well be the great wall of Westeros in a hard-capped sport like hockey.
The only two goalies making at least $10 million annually are Montreal’s Carey Price and Florida’s Sergei Bobrovsky. Both have won the Vezina Trophy, while Bobrovsky just backstopped the Panthers to their first Stanley Cup.
For convoluted reasons unique to hockey, it’s not Swayman’s turn to make that kind of dough. But if ever a player were positioned to challenge a system which prioritizes past performance over future projection, it’s the UMaine grad.
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The Bruins, after all, are legit Cup contenders, thanks to Sweeney’s otherwise solid offseason. He added two-way center Elias Lindholm and bruising defenseman Nikita Zadorov to address a lack of physicality that doomed the B’s in the second round vs. the Panthers. After years of regular season success that didn’t translate to the playoffs, the Bruins suddenly look built to win next spring.
That optimism evaporates without Swayman, which is why I don’t buy the argument that the Bruins hold all the leverage.
There’s no way they want to gamble their season on the untested Brandon Bussi and/or declining Joonas Korpisalo, simply because Boston’s goalie platoon technically denied Swayman the opportunity to be a full-time No. 1 and thus make No. 1 money. He sure looked the part last spring vs. the Maple Leafs and Panthers, when the Bruins handed him the reins. He is widely considered a top-10 talent, so pay him like one.
The Bruins are…