Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman is a bit of a zen master.
Now, that’s typically the approach of most goaltenders in the National Hockey League these days. Perhaps it’s the only approach one can take to remain sane and centered when there’s a red light and horn, sometimes even smoke, that alerts the world of your mistake every time you make a mistake every night at your job.
But on Sunday, and after being given a mercy pull of sorts from Marco Sturm following the sixth Buffalo goal in what finished as 6-1 humiliation at TD Garden, Swayman dropped the zen mindset and decided to give it to his teammates. And on Monday, with a night to compose himself and his thoughts ahead of a do-or-die Game 5 in Buffalo on Tuesday with his team down three games to one, Swayman decided to explain himself.
“We have an extremely competitive group. And we all have a standard that we all carry ourselves to, and it wasn’t met,” Swayman said of his Game 4 blow-up. “So that was just emotion. It’s moved on, and we have a job to do in Buffalo now.”
Ultimately tagged for six goals on 29 shots in just under 47 minutes of work, Swayman’s outburst was honestly beyond fair given what the team put forth in front of him.
On Buffalo’s first goal, Charlie McAvoy sent a breakout pass to no man’s land, and while it was corralled by Fraser Minten, Minten brought it back in the defensive zone and quite literally handed it off to Alex Tuch for an odd-man rush buried by Peyton Krebs. Their second goal saw Hampus Lindholm flub what should’ve been an easy clear and seven seconds later it was in the Boston net.
One of the easier goals for the Sabres in this entire series, the third goal saw Jordan Harris cough the puck up with a mere stick poke by Josh Doan, while Jonathan Aspirot got out of the way for Zach Benson’s drive to Swayman’s crease. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Buffalo’s fourth goal then saw the Bruins win a defensive-zone faceoff… and then lose every single battle en route to an easy burial by Bowen Byram.
Down by four through 40 minutes, the Bruins decided to dig their grave even deeper when Morgan Geekie lost a battle with ease along his own wall on the way to a Beck Malenstyn deflection, and Swayman’s night mercifully came to an end when another Jordan Harris turnover led to an Alex Tuch exclamation point goal.
It honestly could’ve been 10-0 without some of the stops that Swayman made in between the B’s gifting the Sabres more turnovers than the Great British Bake Off.
Speaking after the loss Sunday, Sturm had absolutely no issue with what his goaltender did or what he said to his teammates.
“Absolutely,” Sturm said when asked if he liked seeing that from Swayman. “At least [we had fire] from one guy, right? It was not his fault. I felt bad for him. That’s why we kept him in there for a while: because he’s a battler [and] he wants to be in it.”
For Swayman, it’s entirely possible that the blow-up was brewing all weekend. The Bruins gave him just one goal of support in a Game 3 loss, and were being shut out at the time Sturm pulled him. And they didn’t score in Game 4 until the final minute of regulation in what was the most worthless playoff goal scored by a Bruins skater since Matt Grzelcyk triggered ‘Zombie Nation’ in the third period of 2019’s Game 7.
In essence, the Bruins weren’t delivering on their end of a promise that Swayman had for the most part kept through the opening games of this series, with a .931 save percentage entering Sunday’s pivotal Game 4 contest.
“You definitely pick and choose times, especially as a goalie, to show emotion,” Swayman noted. “But you win as a team and you lose as a team. And everyone in here has a standard that we know we’re capable of. And I think that’s really what the underlying cause is here. We know we have a job to do, we know we can compete at an extremely high level, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
And while the fire was appreciated, the Bruins will certainly need Swayman to get back to his zen master ways on Tuesday to keep their season alive.
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