Bruins Won’t Have To Worry About Goalies, But Playoff Question Lingers

One of the Bruins’ biggest strengths in last year’s record-breaking season became a hot-button topic once the playoffs rolled around.

Boston rode the goalie tandem of Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman to the best regular season in NHL history in 2022-23. The Jennings Trophy-winning duo largely shared the net, with Ullmark getting 48 starts and Swayman leading the team out 33 times.

Despite the lighter workloads, Ullmark was so impressive that he still won the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s top goaltender, while Swayman was awarded $3.475 million in arbitration that puts him in a neighborhood currently occupied by goalies like Ilya Samsonov, Marc-Andre Fleury and Vitek Vanecek.

Yet, when the playoffs came, the pair wasn’t able to replicate its regular-season dominance. That’s likely in part because of the team’s resistance to continue using a rotation, a tactic that quite frankly isn’t used very often, if at all, in the playoffs.

Unfortunately for the Bruins, Ullmark struggled, allowing 20 goals in six games. Ullmark reportedly was dealing with an injury, but Bruins coach Jim Montgomery didn’t call Swayman’s number until a do-or-die Game 7. Boston’s dream season died when Swayman gave up four goals on 31 shots in an overtime heartbreaker.

Montgomery admitted that, in hindsight, he “absolutely” regretted not going to Swayman earlier in the series, pledging to learn from the experience as he moved forward.

So, what exactly does that mean for the 2023-24 Bruins? Given the team’s cap crunch and the fact that Boston is in the top 10 of the league in terms of money allocated to the goaltending position, it would not have been shocking to see the Bruins trade from that position of power during the summer to address other perceived weaknesses. Instead, general manager Don Sweeney opted to keep both netminders. That is as good of an indication as any that the Bruins are probably going to divvy up responsibilities between the pipes in a similar fashion this season.

“We were really good in the regular season; we didn’t play as well as a team and they are part of that in the playoffs and we fell woefully short of what we set out to do,” Sweeney said in June at the NHL draft. “I think we’re in a terrific spot, if we do decide (to run it back) and that is what our indications are right now, unless something else materialized between now and then.”

If anything, the Bruins look at the goaltending situation as a luxury that will afford them time and patience at other positions on the ice. It’s no secret the Bruins are going through some sort of transition after Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci retired in the offseason and the club traded Taylor Hall to Chicago. The Bruins need Ullmark and Swayman to be at least close to what they were last season in order to contend for the playoffs.

Montgomery said at the start of training camp that the No. 1 goal of his team is to make the playoffs. If they do that, he said, then they’re more than capable of making a run as one of the 16 teams in the tournament. What remains unclear, though, is whether the Bruins will make any tweaks to how they deploy their goaltenders. Playoff games are a different beast for everyone, goalies included, but again, it’s borderline unprecedented for a team to make a deep run without riding its top goaltender.

Then again, the sort of production the Bruins got from Ullmark and Swayman a year ago was borderline unprecedented. It’s a big reason why the postseason strategy had its critics and why Montgomery had second thoughts in hindsight.

Following an offseason of change, the Bruins should enter the new campaign with full confidence in their goaltenders. It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed at all from last season, and there’s comfort in that familiarity.

But the answers to the difficult questions probably won’t come for another six months, and if Boston is in a position where it’s talking about the playoffs, the club should welcome that conversation.