- Jeremy Swayman addressed Sunday’s bench outburst after the Bruins were buried 6-1 by Buffalo in Game 4
- Swayman called it “emotion,” pointing to a standard the room wasn’t meeting
- Read below for Marco Sturm’s full defense of his goalie and what Game 5 looks like with Boston down 3-1
Jeremy Swayman is fine with people seeing what they saw.
The Bruins goalie got pulled in the third period of Sunday’s 6-1 Game 4 disaster against Buffalo, and on his way to the tunnel he was caught on camera screaming at his own bench. The clip went everywhere within minutes.
Swayman finally addressed the moment Monday before Boston flew to Buffalo for an elimination game. He didn’t walk it back.
“We have an extremely high competitive group. We all have a standard that we all carry ourselves to, and it wasn’t met. So that was just emotion,” Swayman told reporters, per Conor Ryan. “It’s moved on now, and we have a job to do going into Buffalo.”
The numbers do not flatter the night. Swayman gave up six goals on 29 shots before Marco Sturm went to Joonas Korpisalo, who stopped all six pucks he saw in mop-up duty. Buffalo had four goals in the first 14 minutes and the TD Garden crowd was booing on the way to the room.
Sturm wasn’t about to throw his goalie under the bus for showing some heat. Asked about the outburst right after the game, the head coach didn’t blink.
“Absolutely. At least one guy. It was not his fault today, I can tell you that,” Sturm said. “That’s why we kept him in there for a while, because he’s a battler, he wants to be in.”
Swayman has been the only thing keeping this series competitive. He’s faced shot after shot, kept Boston in earlier games, and watched his defense leak Grade-A chances all over the ice. Sunday felt like it broke something loose.
The bigger picture is uglier than one bad period. Per the Boston Globe, the Bruins are now 3-10 in their last 13 home playoff games dating back to 2023, their worst home stretch since the late 1990s. The booing on Sunday wasn’t out of nowhere.
Boston now trails the series 3-1 and travels to Buffalo for Game 5 on Tuesday night. Sabres goalie Alex Lyon is dialed in, and the Bruins will need three straight wins to keep their year alive after a demolition job at home on Sunday.
If Swayman wants his teammates to match the standard, he’s going to need them to start in the next 60 minutes. Otherwise the offseason starts in Western New York.
