At the beginning of the offseason, I wrote about how the Bruins needed to pay Jeremy Swayman whatever he wanted and give him a six-to-eight year deal. With his contract talks getting a fair amount of press recently, I figured it was a good time to revisit what I said a few months ago and see if anything has changed.
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As of this moment, there is no new contract and a number of rumors have been swirling around for the past week. Both sides are supposedly still far apart and Swayman is rumored to be asking for an average annual value (AAV) of $10 million, which is more than the Bruins current cap space of $8.6 million. There are also worries this won’t get settled before training camp opens on Sept. 18 and he’ll be a holdout until then.
Neither side elected for arbitration, which makes sense after Swayman’s comments about his experience with salary arbitration last summer. The arbitration awarded him a one-year, $3.475 million contract, but after his play last season, particularly in the playoffs, and with the expanded role he’ll have going forward, he’s earned a significant bump.
Swayman Still Deserves Whatever He Wants
At the beginning of the offseason, I wrote that it was imperative for the Bruins to avoid going to arbitration with Swayman for a second year in a row. While this could lead to a holdout, arbitration is not an easy process and one that obviously left a bad taste in Swayman’s mouth last time. Of course, everyone is adults and knows this is a business at the end of the day, but it still has to sting to listen to someone argue and present a case against giving you more money to an arbitrator. Thankfully, as mentioned above, it was avoided.
Swayman is still an important cornerstone the franchise can, should, and will build around for the next decade. Him, David Pastrnak, Charlie McAvoy, Elias Lindholm, and Hampus Lindholm are the core of the team for the foreseeable future. The others mentioned all have been given seven-to-eight-year deals with an AAV of $6.5 million (Hampus Lindholm) or higher.
Swayman’s still young, but since coming into the league, he has been an excellent and solid goaltender for the Bruins. Is there room for improvement in some areas? Sure. No goaltender is perfect. But realistically, there is fewer than five other guys around the league that I and probably most hockey fans would want in the net over him. The 2024 playoffs also demonstrated that he is ready to be “The Guy.” That performance alone easily bumped his next contract up a bit.
Bruins Can’t Afford Not to Have Swayman
As I concluded back in May and still conclude now, the Bruins don’t have a reason not to meet Swayman’s demands. In 132 career games, he has a 79-33-15 record with a goals against average of 2.34 and save percentage of .919, stats on par with many of the best in the league. Yes, he doesn’t have as many games as those guys, but the sample size is still large enough to prove himself.
In fact, it’s even more of a reality now that the Bruins don’t really have a choice but to give him what he wants in light of the Linus Ullmark trade. The team no longer has the best goaltending tandem in the league. Who knows which Joonas Korpisalo will be taking the net this season. Is he the guy he was last season in with the Ottawa Senators or is he capable of getting back to who he was with the Columbus Blue Jackets? Either way, he is best suited in a more traditional backup role, leaving Swayman to do the heavy lifting for the season.
The Bruins have relied on the strength of their goaltending for over a decade, going from the years of Tuukka Rask to the rotation of Ullmark and Swayman the last two seasons that was truly the strongest part of the roster.
In a lot of ways, the Bruins shot themselves in the foot going into this negotiation by trading Ullmark earlier this summer. Swayman shares the same agent as the Toronto Maple Leafs’ William Nylander, who famously had the longest hold out in salary capers history back in the 2018-19 season. Without Ullmark, the Bruins really don’t have any leverage and are going to be much more desperate to solve this before the regular season starts.
With the uncertainty with Korpisalo and Brandon Bussi, who is the Bruins’ top goaltender in the American Hockey League but has no NHL experience, the Bruins really need him to be ready to go for the start of the season. Playing without him for any length of time could really threaten how the team performs in 2024-25. Yes, they managed to address other areas of weakness this offseason, but good goaltending is still essential to the DNA of this roster.
Swayman’s Contract
One way or another, Swayman will be in net this season for the Bruins, but he’s earned the right to get himself a good contract. At the end of the day, this is a business and hockey players only have so many years to profit on this. I don’t think he’s asking for $10 million a year like the rumors have been saying, but if he’s aiming in the $8.5 million to $9.5 million range, putting him on par with other top goaltenders like Andrei Vasilevskiy and Connor Hellebuyck, that isn’t an unreasonable number, especially in light of salary cap increases since those guys signed their contracts.
The Bruins’ last long term contract for a goaltender was Rask, who signed a seven-year contract with an AAV of $7.0 million that went into effect in the 2013-14 season. The salary cap was $64.3 million in 2013-14 and is now $88 million, an increase of $23.7 million over the last decade. Rask’s $7 million therefore took up 10.8% of the Bruins’ cap that year, and it only went down as the cap continued to grow. 10.8% of 88 million is almost exactly $9.5 million.
Additionally, Rask had 138 games of NHL experience prior to the 2013-14 season, only six more than Swayman’s 132. If the Bruins were delegating 10.8% of their salary cap to Rask in 2013-14, it is not unreasonable for Swayman to ask be given the same thing. The $8.5 million to $9.5 million range would make him the the third-highest paid player on the team, behind Pastrnak ($11.25 million AAV) and on par or behind McAvoy ($9.5 million AAV), which again, is fair. Swayman is arguably the second-or-third-most-important person on the roster currently, and that should be reflected in his contract.
Now, as mentioned above, the Bruins only have $8.6 million left in cap space, which is a bit of a failure on the front office’s part to leave them with so little space when it has pretty much been known since the beginning of the offseason that Swayman’s contract could carry an AAV north of $8 million. It may be a contributing factor to why no contract has been reached yet as the Bruins are probably doing a mix of trying really hard to get him to an AAV of $8.5 million or less, or figuring out solutions to create a bit more cap space.
Regular Season Draws Near
Time is ticking with September only a few days away. Plenty of restricted free agents have had holdouts during training camp, including McAvoy who missed a few days of the 2019 training camp waiting for his contract. Missing time is obviously not ideal for anyone, even Swayman.
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Swayman has certainly earned the right to negotiate a good contract for himself. No one but Swayman’s team and the Bruins’ front office really knows what the state of the negotiations are or what the asking prices are. Management and fans can’t expect or blame players for asking for what they are worth.
With the recent news of Juuse Saros’ new contract with the Nashville Predators coming in with an AAV of $7.74 million, maybe the Bruins are able to get him back down to the $8 to $8.5 million range, which would certainly be ideal for management as they don’t have to do anything to create more space. Maybe it will have no effect and Swayman continues to ask for higher than that. Either way, the Bruins don’t have many other choices. The fault is on them if they don’t have the cap space for it anymore when they had more than enough at the beginning of the season, and if they really, firmly didn’t want to pay him north of $8 million this offseason, they probably should have kept Ullmark at $5 million AAV for another season.
