Better luck next year: Jeremy Swayman needs more help from the Boston Bruins

Jeremy Swayman carried this team into the playoffs. Asking him to do that again would be unfair.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the Boston Bruins.

Jeremy Swayman did not get enough love in the NHL Awards voting this year.

I am not necessarily going to argue that he should have won the Vezina Trophy (as the league’s best goalie) and Hart Trophy (as league MVP), but he had strong arguments for both. If nothing else, he was probably deserving of more than two first-place Vezina votes from the NHL’s general managers, and was almost certainly deserving of more than just two fifth-place votes in the MVP race from the PHWA, even in a year where there were a lot of worthy contenders.

When it comes to the MVP, his teammate, David Pastrnak, was one of those worthy contenders and finished a few spots ahead of Swayman in the voting.

But with all due respect to Pastrnak, a truly wonderful and dominant player, Swayman should have been the higher of the two Bruins MVP candidates, and I am not sure it should have been close.

He was not only one of the best goalies in the league, he was arguably the single biggest reason an otherwise average Bruins team even made it into the playoffs and won as many games as it did.

As I’ve said many, many times before, if you are holding the MVP award to the “value” standard, it should probably go to a goalie every year. And even if it doesn’t go to a goalie, goalies should be far more represented at the top of the voting because nobody, and no single position, impacts teams more over the course of a full season, both positively and negatively.

Swayman’s bounce-back year pretty much saved the Bruins season. This team still has a LOT of problems, and especially as it relates to its defensive play.

In the Patrice Bergeron-Zdeno Chara days the Bruins were one of the gold standards for shutdown defensive play, and were routinely one of the league’s toughest teams to generate offense against. As players like Bergeron, Chara and the rest of that core moved on and retired, the Bruins haven’t really been able to recapture that.

All you have to do is open the hood and look at the numbers beneath the surface to see just how impactful Swayman was, and how badly the team played around him defensively.

First, the Bruins’ 5-on-5 defensive numbers and ranks. All numbers are per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play:

• Total shot attempts against: 59.8 (27th)

• Shots on goal against: 27.2 (23rd)

• Scoring chances against: 27.2 (22nd)

• High-danger scoring chances against: 12.5 (28th)

• Expected goals against: 2.93 (30th)

• Overall expected goal share: 46.6% (28th)

Brutal numbers, and really no way to sugarcoat them. This was a bad defensive team. It was a bad team in terms of out-chancing its opponents and pushing play during 5-on-5 play. It was a bad team in terms of suppressing chances against.

No playoff team had a worse expected goal share than the Bruins.

They were one of only two teams that ranked lower than 18th in the league in expected goal share that actually made the playoffs (the Montreal Canadiens at 23rd were the other).

The play of Swayman is what allowed them to overcome all of that.

Thanks to his .907 all-situations save percentage he saved 18.2 goals above average, the seventh-best mark in the league.

His 28.8 goals saved above expected (via MoneyPuck) was the second-highest mark in the league, trailing only the 29.3 goals saved above expected from Washington Capitals goalie Logan Thompson.

Add 29 more goals to the Bruins goals against total and they go from 14th in the NHL to 28th. Hell, add just 10 more goals against and they go from 14th to 23rd.

For a team that played 38 one-goal games, and went 20-8-10 in those games, those saved goals on the fringes almost certainly added up in a big way.

Without Swayman playing the way he does, this team does not likely sniff the playoffs.

And that’s an easy thing to say because we saw it play out a year ago.

After holding out throughout the 2024-25 preseason and training camp and eventually signing an eight-year contract that made him one of the highest-paid goalies in the league, Swayman never really found his game and had one of the worst seasons of his career. It was an important year for him not only because of the contract and the tumultuous negotiation that preceded it, but also because it was his first full season as the unquestioned starting goalie in Boston.

There was no more tandem with Linus Ullmark.

No more split net.

No more favorable matchups or rest throughout the season.

It was all on Swayman, and initially it did not go well. Part of that may have been the adjustment from platoon starter to full-time starter, and part of it may have been the fact he missed training camp and the preseason. But the end result was a season where he finished with an .892 save percentage and was minus-9.1 in goals saved above expected.

The Bruins were tied for the worst record in the Eastern Conference and finished 26th in the league in goals against. And that was with Pastrnak having a 43-goal, 106-point season.

The shift from the 2024-25 Swayman performance, to this season’s performance, was a 37-goal shift in goals saved above expected.

Think that wasn’t worth a few extra wins and a few extra points in the standings?

It is the sort of thing that presents a good news/bad news scenario for the Bruins going into the offseason.

The good news? They have a goalie that can elevate them, change games and carry the team when the rest of it is not working.

The bad news? Teams with that level of goaltending have a tendency to ignore problems that are lurking beneath the surface because they are either not paying attention to them, or just put too much trust and faith in the goalie. It rarely works.

The Bruins can not allow that to happen.

Let’s talk about that a little more, as well as everything that went right and wrong for the 2025-26 Bruins.

What went right this season