Let’s start off with the obvious here.
There’s no way Jeremy Swayman and his camp are looking for $10 million a season.
One of the WEEI on-air hosts, Rich Keefe, on a sports radio station that just had major shakeups with its programming talent dropped a bomb that they had a scoop about the amount of real dollars that Swayman is looking for as both the goaltender and teams are far apart in contract negotiations.
Scoops Keefe is led to believe that Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman is asking for $10 Million per year pic.twitter.com/6VVzq9pwQj
— Jones & Keefe (@JonesandKeefe) August 26, 2024
Here’s a good rule of thumb in a world where fake news or things that aren’t necessarily 100 percent true can proliferate on social media: Whenever a juicy B’s news nugget drops from a source not generally known for breaking Bruins news, it is best to be skeptical about the accuracy and veracity of the admittedly juicy "scoop". It would also be ludicrous for 25-year-old Swayman to be paid at the levels of Andrei Vasilevskiy, Carey Price and Sergei Bobrovsky AFTER they had all won Vezina Trophies as the best goaltender in the league.
Swayman is sitting in a unique spot because he played so well last spring during the Stanley Cup playoffs, and he had a bit of a breakout season where he was invited to NHL All-Star weekend and his effectiveness last season ultimately led the Black and Gold to trade Linus Ullmark to the Ottawa Senators this summer. The Ullmark trade truthfully took away any hard line bargaining power that the Bruins held over Swayman, as did their goodwill gesture not to pursue arbitration this summer.
That’s led Swayman to feeling very confident about his game this summer as negotiations play out, which he absolutely should as a young NHL star on the rise, and one that will get paid in a long-term deal mostly on what the vast majority of hockey folks, including the Bruins, believe will be elite future performance between the pipes.
“If you were to ask me that same question a year ago I would answer it truthfully and I would say it’s scary and it’s a lot of resentment toward people that want you to succeed, and when you’re not getting compensated for your endless efforts and what you do best, it’s a nerve-wracking feeling because it’s your family that you are fighting for," said Swayman. “The answer I’m going to give you this year is that I’ve educated myself. I understand the business side of it all and it’s given me a completely new mindset of understanding the business and how to react to it. I understand the cap is going up and where it will be in years,” said Swayman to the “Shut up Marc” podcast. “I understand my comparables and I can’t ruin the goalie market for other players that are coming on down the line. I went to the school of business at the University of Maine, so I understand it and I love it all. I’m doing classes at Stanford right now through the NHLPA for business. I understand that these experiences that I’m having now are going to help me post-career when I want to be a businessman and when I want to talk about serious stuff.”
Jeremy Swayman remains an unsigned RFA, and shed light into his ongoing contract negotiations.
— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) August 28, 2024
(via @MarcLewisIsCool, @SavageSports_) pic.twitter.com/zrizpFnBXR
An interesting follow-up for Swayman would be who he believes his comparables are because that’s a difficult one to nail down.
The closest thing he has to a comparable is Islanders goaltender Ilya Sorokin, who signed an eight-year deal for $66 million last season, but Sorokin has averaged 57 games played per season over the last three years with a high of 62 games played in 2022-23, he’s been a Vezina Trophy finalist once and an NHL All-League selection once as well at this point. In most people’s estimation, that is going to leave Swayman at least one rung below Sorokin in terms of truly being a comparable player from a contract negotiation perspective.
The games played thing is something that Cam Neely mentioned specifically while on Rich Sherternlieb’s Morning Show on WZLX last week.
“You’re still wondering a little bit [about life without Ullmark] because Jeremy has never played more than 44 games in a season. [44 games is] still significant, but it’s not 60 or 65 [games played] and Linus certainly helped us have the [won/loss] records that we did the last couple of years,” said Neely. “They’re both great goaltenders. Jeremy is a guy that’s so focused and so determined and he’s got a lot of confidence in himself.
“And with the age, he is [at just 25 years old], we obviously decided we’re going to ride with Jeremy. Linus has done so much for the organization on and off the ice and is a great person, but we felt that we weren’t probably going to re-sign him, so we decided to move him [to the Ottawa Senators].”
But Swayman has never played more than 44 games in a season, has never truly been a No. 1 goaltender in the NHL for the duration of a whole regular season without a tandem partner talented enough to win a Vezina Trophy in his own right and Swayman didn’t ever even received Vezina Trophy votes until this past season when he finished seventh in the voting.
None of this is to denigrate Swayman because he tracks as a franchise goaltender who’s going to accomplish all of these things sporting a career .919 save percentage and a sterling record of 79-33-15 in his three-plus season career.
Swayman could very well be Vasilevskiy, Price and Bobrovsky in a couple of seasons, but he needs to prove he can maintain his level of play, his mental sharpness and his health while logging the 55-65 games per season that traditionally defines somebody as a workhorse, franchise goaltender.
It feels like Swayman’s true contract number should come in under the $8.25 million that Sorokin commanded on his contract with the Isles, and slot somewhere in the $7-8 million AAV range that the Bruins currently have ($8.6 million per our friends at PuckPedia) set aside in salary cap space.
That is what makes these negotiations difficult as it might have been much easier sledding for Swayman and the Bruins if Don Sweeney had requested a two-year arbitration decision one year ago rather than the one-year award that ultimately left Swayman feeling a bit salty last season about the whole sticky process.
The hope by all parties involved is that the contract can get done by mid-September ahead of NHL training camp to avoid distractions, or Swayman in any getting sidetracked by missing important time with his teammates at an NHL preseason that seems to get shorter and shorter over passing time. It doesn’t feel like something punitive like a trade or an extended holdout is coming down the pipe at this point, but one wonders how everybody is going to feel three weeks from now if not much progress has been made on either side that doesn’t feel much like they want to budge at this point.