How does Jeremy Swayman's contract impact Jake Oettinger's next deal?
A look at how one American goalie could impact the other.
The long-standing Jeremy Swayman national nightmare is over.
The Boston Bruins and their starting goalie agreed to terms this weekend on an eight-year, $8.25 million AAV contract, ensuring he’ll be in net at some point this week for the NHL team.
It turns out the “64 million” reasons to sign simply needed to be 66 million reasons to sign.
It also played out kind of as I expected and touched on last week. Cam Neely was the bad cop as team president, GM Don Sweeney was the good cop and in the end it worked.
The deal is fascinating and a bit unprecedented for a goalie with Swayman’s track record, as my friends over at AFP Analytics noted he was projected around $6.4 million on a five-year deal.
Naturally, for many readers of this site, Swayman’s deal adds some intrigue to the pending deal for Dallas Stars goalie Jake Oettinger.
Oettinger will be a restricted free agent in the offseason and is entering the final year of a three-year contract that paid him $4 million per season.
Oettinger is coming in with a higher RFA salary than Swayman, who made $3.475 million last season, and, in my view, has a more established track record as a No. 1 goalie than Swayman did.
And if Oettinger outplays Swayman at all this season, which seems highly possible, the Stars goalie is easily in the $8 million per year stratosphere.
Which is why it would behoove the Stars to get moving early on Oettinger’s extension.
On the opposite side of the same coin, it’s why it would probably behoove Oettinger’s agent, Ben Hankinson, to stall any negotiations until after the season is completed.
Swayman vs. Oettinger will also be a case study in how much state tax and real value actually play on a contract.
It’s not an exact science, but on $8.25 million Swayman will pay roughly $700,000 per season in state taxes to the government of Massachusetts. There is no state income tax in the State of Texas, meaning a matching deal for Oettinger would be worth more in real money than Swayman signed in Boston.
So, the Stars, in theory, could work this angle to try and get Oettinger to more team-friendly cap hit under $8 million per season.
One thing that state taxes don’t cover, however, are athlete ego. With NHL contracts all effectively being public, players use them to measure their worth in the wider NHL landscape — contract comps are also ego comps — and if Oettinger believes he’s better than Swayman, and both goalies, I know, think very highly of themselves, the floor might start at $8.25 million for Oettinger, state taxes be damned.
All of this contract talk has made me think about the most recent conversation my co-host Prashanth Iyer and I had on “Expected by Whom?” with agent Allain Roy.
In that conversation Allain explained several nuances of the business and how certain players might take a deal their agent wouldn’t have suggested. It’s a fascinating listen, check it out here: