Skimming through this thread while not quite sitting on the fence as far as who’s in the right…..I can see both sides of the argument to varying extents.
The tl;dr is that this looks like Swayman is an A-tier “tandem deployment” goalie trying to get paid like the bonafide #1 he hasn’t yet proven himself to be in the “games played” column.
At the end of the day, numbers don’t lie. This means there’s justification behind Swayman’s assessment of his value and position as a guy the Bruins may not afford losing so cleanly. This also means that the Bruins are in the right to point out their current cap situation, the total number of games that Swayman has handled in a season, and the amount/rate the cap could increase by in just one year.
Sure, slipping the 64M comment out there looks like a poor move, but it also laid the offer bare where Swayman sees both the exasperation and sum of the contract with less of an opportunity for Lewis Gross to do anything dodgy with how information is presented. Yesterday I thought it was frustration. Today, it looked like a guy holding a boombox over his head outside of the window of a girlfriend as an attempt to end a fight. Then you factor in how Gross’ negotiations went with Krug & Nylander…..
I may just be slightly more with Neely on this one. It sounds like Lewis Gross is content to be the bug biting the bear’s ass. He’s already a spanner in the works of negotiations, and it looks like he’s a noticeable portion of the influence behind Swayman over-appraising his own value against his max number of games played.
If Swayman had a few seasons where he took 50+ starts, Cam Neely would look stubborn as hell. As it stands, IMO he looks cutthroat…..and absolutely correct.