Bruins sign Jeremy Swayman to eight-year, $66 million deal

BOSTON — Less than a week after the two sides exchanged words harsh enough to make the outside world believe their profession relationship was down to its last withered thread, the Bruins and Jeremy Swayman arrived at an eight-year contract extension worth $66 million on Sunday.

With the process done and an $8.25 million average annual value hammered out, the deal was heralded with the now requisite club-generated TikToks and Twitter posts. Happy face emojis, all around.

But this was as acrimonious a negotiation as GM Don Sweeney has dealt with in his 10-year tenure, at least publicly. At the start of training camp, the ever-proper GM was moved to drop an expletive while addressing a narrative from a popular podcast that he wasn’t taking the Swayman camp’s calls for three weeks and that the B’s weren’t willing to do an eight-year max deal.

Then on Monday came the whopper. Team president Cam Neely hurled his now famous line that he had “64 million reasons” if he were Jeremy Swayman to sign a deal. That prompted Swayman’s agent Lewis Gross to go as far as to put his name on a public comment, saying that that figure had never been on the table. The differences were reconciled to make Swayman a very rich young man.

So who won the negotiation? If we’re to believe what had been reported through anonymous sources from various outlets, the Bruins started out at $6.5 million a year and the Swayman camp began at $9.5 million annually, so in the end the B’s a quarter million more than the player. If there’s a Stanley Cup or two in the next eight years, they can call it even.

Now that a deal is done, neither side was willing to say whether Neely’s comments provided any impetus to get it done. And they were not willing to get into the kind of specifics that Neely and Gross got into last Monday.

“I just think in the spirit of negotiations, there’s a range of things where people are talking,” said Sweeney. “I think in Lewis’ and my communication – and he’s really good at advocating for his client and when push-back comes, he’s defending his client in a sense — specifics in our conversations are important. In the exterior and the narrative, they’re not as important. You just have to stay in communication and work through some of those sticky points.”

When asked about whether that $64 million was on the table at the time of Neely’s comments, Swayman would not answer specifically and remained appreciative of Gross’ work.

“Lewis was incredible in this entire process and it just goes to show what he would do to protect me as his client and sticking his neck out and making sure everyone knew that some accusations are true and some are false,” said Swayman, expected to back up Joonas Korpisalo until he gets into game shape. “It’s not my job right here, right now to give you that answer. Obviously our party, our team knows the truth. But at the same time we found an agreement. And that fact that I’m here for eight years gives me goose bumps saying that.”

According to puckpedia.com, the deal calls for $23 million in signing bonuses to be paid out of over the life of the contract. A full no-move clause will activate in Year 3 when he would have become an unrestricted free agent and that runs through Year 6. In Year 7, he must submit a 10-team approved trade list and in the final year it flips to a 10-team no-trade list.

It was important for the two sides to get the deal done before Monday’s 5 p.m. roster deadline. Under the CBA rules, the B’s cap hit to any potential deal for Swayman would have grown daily by approximately $36,000 while Swayman’s take-home pay would have gone down daily. The B’s cap situation is tight enough without having to pay penalties. To make cap room, the B’s placed goalies Brandon Bussi and Jiri Patera, defenseman Billy Sweezey and forwards Jeff Viel and Patrick Brown on waivers. That they choose to sign Tyler Johnson is yet to be determined.

One thing that Neely’s comments seemed to do was get the fans on the team’s side. Whether it was on talk shows, Twitter or various media polls, more and more people were siding with the Bruins, something that would have been unheard of a couple of decades ago.

But when he was asked if he was concerned the court of public opinion was turning against him, it became clear that Swayman’s mental algorithm allows in only the good vibes.

“It’s funny you say that because I felt an incredible amount of support in this entire process,” said Swayman, who worked out at Boston University during the stalemate. “Every day there were calls coming in and those are the people that truly care about you as an individual. They’re not in your shoes and they understand that you’re in that spotlight. And to see the amount of people that were coming out of the woodwork and just reaching out to me and my family, just showing support and love. That for me was what mattered most. And to see the outreach of fans and this city just really supporting me through this process just showed how much it means to me to be a Boston Bruin. That was one ting that drove me every day to stay in the moment and keep my glass-half-full mentality and keep a smile on my face.”

But he admitted that it took an effort to keep bad thoughts out when he was asked if he ever thought he might end up elsewhere because of the impasse.

“Through the process, there’s a lot of demons that can creep in your head,” said Swayman. “There’s a lot of unknowns. Again, what I knew was that my heart was going to be in Boston and I was going to do everything I could and my team would do what we could to stay a Bruin my whole career. And that’s going to continue. The light was at the end of the tunnel and we knew we had tools and reason to stay here. Again, management felt the same thing, so that was a really special point where we finally reached an agreement and we’re both in same boat of wanting to win Stanley Cups.”

Now the pressure is on the live up to the deal.

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