Pain begins Monday for Boston Bruins and Jeremy Swayman in RFA stalemate

BOSTON — Tick. Tock. The pressure on the Boston Bruins and No. 1 goaltender Jeremy Swayman in this RFA standoff will ratchet up in a big way on Monday — for both sides.

All 32 teams must submit their season-opening roster by 5 o’clock on Monday, the first of 192 days of salary cap counting for the 2024-25 regular season. Since Swayman is a restricted free agent, if he is not signed by the start of the regular season, his salary-cap hit for Year 1 of his new deal will be higher on the Bruins’ cap than the remaining years of the deal. That will be difficult for the Bruins to navigate.

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 is a hit to Swayman’s wallet. Each day is a hit to the Bruins’ cap. In other words, logic would indicate that Swayman should see Boston’s best offer on Sunday or Monday morning — if he hasn’t already.

Sources confirmed the Bruins have indeed put a $64 million offer on the table. Whether that was presented before or after Cam Neely’s comments this week remains open for interpretation.

Of course, Swayman’s agent, Lewis Gross, is well-versed and experienced in a negotiation like this one. Gross client William Nylander and the Toronto Maple Leafs went to the wire, the Dec. 1 signing deadline for RFAs, in 2017 before signing a $45 million deal over six years. 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.

There are two major differences in this negotiation. The Bruins will have limits in how this is structured relative to their cap, depending on how much space they can bank as this drags out with as lean a roster they can assemble each day. And there is seemingly a much smaller window for Swayman to be made whole in the form of a signing bonus, because it will only increase the cap hit.

Here is a handy calculator, for illustration only, on the importance of each day for both the Bruins and Swayman:

RFA In-Season Signing Calculator

(Based on 8 years x $8 million = $64 million, All Salary, No Signing Bonus, $8 million first year base salary)