For the first 50 minutes, Saturday night’s game against the Sharks wasn’t looking like a particularly memorable one for Jeremy Swayman. He had faced just nine shots to that point, and the one goal he had allowed came on a stoppable shot that just squeezed under his pad.
Sometimes it’s not about how many saves you make, though, but rather when you make them. The San Jose offense finally woke up in the game’s last 10 minutes, and Swayman needed to rise to the challenge to preserve a one-goal lead. He did, and then Patrice Bergeron added an insurance goal in the final minute to seal a 3-1 victory and extend the Bruins’ winning streak to four games.
Swayman made seven saves down the stretch, which still doesn’t seem like a ton, but several were on really high-quality chances. With 7:15 to go, he made a point-blank save on a Noah Gregor chance from the slot. A minute later, he denied a Tomas Hertl backhand bid from close range.
Swayman’s crowning achievement came with a little over three minutes to go. He made a good save on a Ryan Merkley shot from the high slot, but the puck trickled behind him. That led to a mad scramble that eventually culminated in Merkley digging the puck free and sliding it over to Hertl. With Swayman still sprawled out and trying to recover, Hertl had a lot of net to shoot at. But Swayman just stuck out his glove in desperation and managed to get Hertl’s shot right in the webbing.
“Obviously an all-world save at the end there,” Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said. “We needed it. The timing was perfect.”
Before the game, Cassidy acknowledged for the first time publicly that Swayman was moving “a little ahead” of Linus Ullmark in the battle for the Bruins’ No. 1 job. The way he closed out Saturday’s win will only help his case. So will his 4-0-1 record and .964 save percentage over the last two weeks.
“He’s getting better and better,” Cassidy said of Swayman. “…It’s almost like the best [goalies] step up when your team has a lull, knowing that, ‘Hey, this is my time now. They need me. I have to be there.’ I think you see that with Sway. There wasn’t a lot going on in front of him, but when he needed to be there, he was.”
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Brad Marchand is officially back. After being held off the scoresheet in his first game back from suspension on Thursday, Marchand led the way offensively on Saturday with two goals and an assist.
He opened the scoring with 5:36 left in the first when he finished off a nice pass from Jake DeBrusk on a 2-on-1. He benefited from another good setup early in the third, one-timing a Taylor Hall needle thread to give the Bruins a 2-1 lead.
As with DeBrusk’s two goals on Thursday, neither of Marchand’s two goals actually came with all three members of the new-look Marchand-Bergeron-DeBrusk top line on the ice. However, that line once again looked good.
In the 7:18 that those three were on the ice at 5-on-5, the Bruins out-attempted the Sharks 14-1 and outshot them 10-0. After the game, Marchand said it’s been fun playing with DeBrusk given how DeBrusk has been playing.
“His biggest thing is when he moves his feet and he competes,” Marchand said of DeBrusk. “He’s been doing that lately, and he’s getting rewarded for it. He has too much talent, he’s too fast, too skilled to not do a lot of good things on the ice when he’s skating and competing. He’s been doing that recently, and it’s been great to see. He’s fun to play with when he’s playing like that.”
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