The 2024-25 NHL regular season is fast approaching, and the contract standoff between the Boston Bruins and their top goaltender remains unresolved.
For the second straight year, Jeremy Swayman is a restricted free agent and, like last year, negotiations have not been easy. Complicating this summer's talks was the team's decision to trade away Swayman's tandem partner, Linus Ullmark, essentially declaring Swayman their No. 1 netminder of the future. But without having shouldered the weight of a full season's workload before — his career-high single-season start count is 43, registered last year — the question this summer has been whether or not he’d be paid like one.
Asked by reporters on Monday about Swayman's ask, Bruins president Cam Neely had some strong words:
"I don't want to get into the weeds with what his ask is, but I know that I have 64 million reasons why I'd be playing right now," he said.
While Neely doesn't completely spell it out, logic leads to the assumption that the Bruins' offer to Swayman is an eight-year deal worth $8 million per season. That AAV would make Swayman the fifth highest-paid netminder in the league this year, behind Florida's Sergei Bobrovsky ($10M AAV), Tampa Bay's Andrei Vasilevskiy ($9.5M), Winnipeg's Connor Hellebuyck ($8.5) and the Islanders' Ilya Sorokin ($8.25). Of that group, only Vasilevskiy was an RFA at the time of signing — the other three were entering UFA seasons when they were locked up.
The Bruins have three more pre-season games ahead of them before kicking off the 2024-25 campaign against the defending Stanley Cup champions in Florida on Oct. 8. Both Bruins GM Don Sweeney and head coach Jim Montgomery indicated during Monday's media availability that at this point, it's unlikely Swayman will be ready to start the season in net even if a deal was done today. Joonas Korpisalo, who was part of the return from Ottawa when the Bruins sent Ullmark to the Senators, is currently set to start the campaign for the club.
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