Things almost got really bad for Jeremy Swayman and the Boston Bruins

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Joshua Deeds
October 6, 2024 (9:11)

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Things almost got bad for Jeremy Swayman, and the Boston Bruins if he didn't sign a contract by Monday.

Monday is when all 32 teams are required to submit their opening night rosters for the season, by 5 o'clock PM. The first 192 days of the season will see how the salary cap affects every team.

The new deal he signed recently, will count higher against the salary cap this season, rather than the remaining years of the deal if he's not signed by the cutoff time on Monday.

This would have made the Bruins cap harder to manage, and that would've been due to how long the situation took to settle.

To explain the situation better:

At the same time, for each day Swayman goes without a contract, he will not be paid. If he signs for $8 million per season, for example, his paycheck will be pro-rated and paid only for the days remaining in the season. There are ways to make up that lost money to Swayman - by providing him with an instantly paid signing bonus in Year 1 - but that will only have a compounding negative effect on the cap hit (explained above).

Each day he would have remained unsigned, the hit would have remained high to both the Bruins' cap space and to Swayman's wallet.

There have been sources that have confirmed that the Bruins did indeed offer Swayman a $64 Million contract. But in the end he ended up getting an 8 year, $8.25 million deal or $66 million contract.

Gross, Jeremy Swayman's agent took William Nylander to the last hour before Nylander would sign a new deal in Toronto, signing a $45 Million deal, for a 6-year term, and it looked like this was about to happen with Jeremy Swayman as well.

Typically, that deal would carry a $7.5 million per year cap hit. But the resulting cap hit exemplifies the trouble the Bruins may be staring down: Instead of $7.5 million, Nylander's cap hit was $10.27 million in Year 1 of the deal. That wasn't a problem for the still-building Maple Leafs, who didn't yet have cap issues, and Toronto then enjoyed a slightly lower cap hit in the remaining five years of the deal ($6.9 million). Nylander was also made whole in the form of a $2 million signing bonus payable on the date he signed the deal, which meant he did not lose any wages.