The Boston Bruins and Jeremy Swayman have entered the Cone of Silence, only this one doesn’t come with canned laughter.
What for several weeks had widely been considered a ceremonial, final lap to reorganizing the Bruins’ goaltending stable has suddenly taken on an old-school, 1990s sort of gloom reminiscent of the labor war that preceded the National Hockey League’s salary-cap era.
The Bruins and Swayman are seeing eye to eye on the 25-year-old goaltender’s long-term role, but they disagree on how that role should be valued, if not within their team’s salary structure, then relative to the league’s other elites at his position.
This isn’t about a starter in baseball but in hockey, where a million per season would make a substantial difference. Reports suggest that the gulf between the two sides could be as much as $3 million in annual average value.
Will Boston Bruins training camp commence without Swayman’s swagger?
Speculation abounds as to bridge deals (but why would the Bruins risk Swayman becoming a free agent?) and deferred salary that will not impact the cap hit now or later (the Carolina Hurricanes have done this now with Jaccob Slavin and Seth Jarvis), but in this space it’s impossible to get away from the fact the Boston Bruins gave both David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy career market-level contracts while they were in developing stages of their respective careers.
Swayman is as far along as they were, if not in responsibility, then arguably more so in terms of performance.
So where to from here?
The footsteps of September 18 can be heard fast approaching, and even should the Bruins and Swayman convene for an 11th-hour meeting of the minds, a gap exceeding $2 million per year seems insurmountable to reach an agreement in time for camp.
In hockey parlance, it then becomes a holdout.
The last time this happened to the Boston Bruins, the aftermath did not go well for the player or the team.
Byron Dafoe was coming off a career 1998-99 season (32-23-11, 2.00 GAA, .926 save pct., NHL-best 10 shutouts) that saw him finish among the top three in Vezina Trophy voting, which is decided by the league’s general managers.
Dafoe’s playoffs (2.03, .921) were comparable, and the Bruins’ six-game elimination of the Carolina Hurricanes stands as their only series victory between opening-round ousters of Montreal in 1994 (old Garden) and 2009 (new Garden). In between those bookends, Dafoe was the only Bruins goalie to win a series.
With the Stanley Cup run of 2011 now fading out of view, it’s become easy to gloss over that decade and a half that closed the old Garden and Raymond Bourque’s career and defined the first five years of Patrice Bergeron’s.
Speaking of last hurrahs, Harry Sinden’s last hurrah as general manager was his frantic fixing of the eroding 1990s nucleus that lost Cam Neely to retirement in 1996.
Year two in the FleetCenter was the Bruins’ worst in modern history, and its turning point came after a loss to the Avalanche in Denver. Frustrated by the state of the franchise, Adam Oates sought out Boston Globe beat writer Nancy Marrapese-Burrell and went on a rant about management, his remarks in the next day’s newspaper forcing Sinden’s hand.
The result was the March 1, 1997, blockbuster trade of Oates, Rick Tocchet and Bill Ranford to Washington for the much younger Jason Allison, Anson Carter, Jim Carey and a third-round draft pick (Lee Goren).
Well on their way by then, the 1996-97 Boston Bruins would finish last of 26 teams, their first playoff miss in 30 years.
That summer, Sinden brought in 11 new players including Joe Thornton (first overall) and Sergei Samsonov (eighth overall) and a highly successful coach named Pat Burns.
In the twilight of his own playing career, P.J. Axelsson (one of those players) would not hesitate to identify Burns as the most defensive coach he ever played for. Axelsson also played in Boston under Mike Keenan, Robbie Ftorek, Mike Sullivan, Dave Lewis and Claude Julien.
Carey, a South Shore (Weymouth) product who had won the Vezina Trophy with the 1995-96 Capitals, was meant to be the backbone of the Bruins’ late ’90s resurgence. But it was Dafoe (acquired from Los Angeles in the Jozef Stumpel/Sandy Moger for Dmitri Khristich trade) who emerged as Burns’ go-to goalie and who would provide the first traction enjoyed by the Bruins in what was then their new arena.
Consecutive 91-point seasons followed by that one series victory set the turn-of-the-century Bruins on course for a climb toward Cup contention when two things went wrong, setting off a franchise-altering chain of events.
The first was rejecting Khristich and his $2.8 million arbitration award. A winger whom Burns called his best defensive forward, the former Soviet led the 1998-99 Bruins with 29 goals and finished second in team scoring to Allison. He would be sorely missed.
Worse, however, was a contentious negotiation between the Bruins and their number-one goalie.
Coming off his best season, Dafoe wanted $4 million per year on a new contract. Sinden was willing to pay $3 million per, and the Bruins went into the 1999-2000 season splitting the nets between Johnny Grahame and Robbie Tallas and got off to the second-worst start in franchise history (0-5-4).
This is where the story gets tricky. Grahame and Tallas were good goaltending prospects, but even more than the fact neither was Dafoe, they were thrust into action amidst an atmosphere of deflation.
Just when it made sense for the Boston Bruins to take another step forward, they were taking steps backward. Add injuries to the mix (Allison played only 37 games), and the Bruins were on course to miss the playoffs for the second time in four years.
What ensued was seismic.
For the first time in his career, Bourque’s performance fell off with his team’s. Unlike in 1996-97 when he soldiered on through Boston’s free fall to the NHL basement, 2000 felt different.
Bourque, as he would initially explain, thought he might be washed up, done at age 39. He realized that he needed to be in a competitive environment to decide if he still had game and requested a trade. The alternative was to retire without ever knowing.
Had Bourque only asked out to chase the Stanley Cup (as is widely believed), he would have jumped ship in 1997 when the team was sinking into oblivion and he was still playing to his Hall of Fame standards.
Bourque wanted to go to Philadelphia; Sinden decided on Colorado. The rest is history.
Dafoe wound up signing a three-year deal on October 29, 1999, at a compromise of $3.4 million per year. He would never again play as well as he had in 1998-99 and battled his own injuries while sharing the net with the Bruins’ prospects.
Instead of Bourque, the Bruins would go into the 2000-01 season with Paul Coffey as their top defenseman. It was a deal Sinden negotiated on a fishing trip in Canada with Coffey and old pal Glen Sather. By the end of October, Sinden fired Burns and brought in Mike Keenan, then abruptly announced his formal resignation as GM, handing the reins to protegee Mike O’Connell.
Given a full, soup-to-nuts crack at it, O’Connell’s physically imposing 2001-02 squad (under Ftorek) would finish second overall in the regular season to eventual champion Detroit, only to sputter in an opening-round, six-game loss to underdog Montreal.
Much would happen in the series, starting after a 5-2, Game 1 loss with a frantic systems change to a left-wing lock (that extra defenseman and former Shark Jeff Norton insisted the Bruins were not fully executing) to the suspension of Kyle McLaren for his clothes-line hit on Richard Zednik late in Game 4.
The Bruins won Game 4 in an infuriated Bell Centre, sending the series back to Boston tied 2-2. But the NHL’s indefinite suspension of McLaren and warning to the Bruins (after Montreal coach Michel Therrien threatened retribution against “their best players”) sapped any momentum that the Bruins would have brought into Game 5. Flat as a pancake, they lost at home and couldn’t recover in Montreal.
Forgettable in the sea of playoff disappointments against Montreal, this one held its own, particular sense of injustice.
Dafoe (3.19 GAA, .865 save pct. for the series) would take the blame.
Standing outside the visiting dressing room afterward, Sinden told this writer, “we played beautifully, we just couldn’t get the puck by their goaltender (Jose Theodore).”
His three-year deal expired, Dafoe was let go by the Bruins, who would trust the nets over the next six seasons to Grahame, Steve Shields, Jeff Hackett, Andrew Raycroft, Felix Potvin, Tim Thomas, Hannu Toivonen, Manny Fernandez and Alex Auld before the Boston net became the exclusive domain of Thomas and Tuukka Rask. There were others, but everyone mentioned above played more than 20 games in at least one season for the Bruins.
Fast-forward to 2024: None of this trial and error could possibly emanate from a contract holdout involving the starter, could it?
Cause-effect or mere coincidence, Dafoe’s 1999 holdout was the domino that led to the deconstruction of the late ’90s Bruins, the Bourque trade, Burns’ dismissal, and a revolving door at the goal crease that lasted several years.
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Last year when the Bruins encouraged Danton Heinen to participate in team activities, there was no danger that the journeyman winger without a contract would pose a distraction by lurking about Warrior Arena into the regular season. An unsigned Swayman, on the other hand, casts a lengthy shadow.
As to the distraction that journeyman Joonas Korpisalo and prospect Brandon Bussi could soon be facing, “Goalie Bob” Essensa will have them focused instead on an unlikely opportunity (should it materialize).
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The fatal rundown of Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau while they were riding bikes on Thursday night in New Jersey, the eve of their sister’s wedding, is cause for anger in addition to great sadness.
Impaired driving is something the justice system must learn to prevent.
The only case for which I was ever picked to be a juror was annoying before it even took place because it so happened to fall on the day that Derek Sanderson was launching an autobiography with support from his good friend Bobby Orr.
A rare media opportunity canceled by a higher calling would have been acceptable, had the case not become an insult to the citizens on the jury and taxpayers at large.
The state had the makings of a solid case, but it died on the vine because the assistant in the district attorney’s office assigned to present it was so inexperienced that it became necessary for the judge to repeatedly whisper procedural instructions. A missed opportunity to place evidence left the jury without a choice: not guilty.
Perhaps desensitized to this sort of miscarriage, the judge visited with us immediately afterward and rather jovially sought our reactions to the process. He then told us the defendant had multiple priors, something we were not made privy to so as not to bias our verdict.
Had I opened my mouth, I would have been held in contempt of court because that was all I felt.
Having been called upon to act as a pawn in this sham of trial that had no reasonable chance of yielding the right verdict, then being told how proud we should be, I issued a fake smile and swore all the way home.
I wonder if the defendant that day has committed vehicular homicide yet, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact I was made complicit in enabling his next opportunity.
Every time something senseless happens to anyone like what just happened to the Gaudreau family, I relive my one day on a jury.
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Add one more name for consideration as the Bruins search for a right winger to skate second line with Charlie Coyle and Brad Marchand.
Tyler Johnson scored 17 goals in 67 games last season with the Chicago Blackhawks. That’s a 20-goal pace that the Bruins obviously considered when inviting the 34-year-old forward to camp on a professional-tryout agreement.
The obvious fly in that ointment was Johnson’s minus-35. Only nine NHL players were outscored by a greater margin at even strength last season; three of those players were his teammates with the Blackhawks, and five of the other six played at least part of the season for San Jose.
Johnson, now 34, played his last relevant hockey at age 30, averaging 10 minutes per game for the Tampa Bay Lightning in their 2021 Cup run.
If he can still muster up some hard-skills hockey for a two-way team, Johnson’s right shot might be of benefit.
Perhaps a positive environment will bring out his best. It’s his last stop, so he needs to make it count.
Rink Rap with Mick Colageo 