Swayman stellar again for Bruins in season-ending Game 6 loss

BOSTON – In the end, there was nothing more Jeremy Swayman could do. He was on the Boston Bruins’ bench, pulled for the extra attacker, as the seconds ticked down on a season he had been responsible for extending.

When it was all over, the time run out, his teammates came to comfort him. A hug from David Pastrnak. Words from Linus Ullmark. Pats and embraces from the rest.

The crowd, disappointed and not quite ready for it to all be over, rallied for him.

“Swayman! Swayman! Swayman!” they chanted.

“Tears, tears,” Swayman said of the moment, his eyes still glassy.

“Just overwhelmed with emotions,” he continued. “It’s not about me as an individual. It’s about our team and to see it all end so abruptly is something you never want to feel. But I’m just so proud of everyone of being here and setting the foundation for what’s to come next.”

This was Swayman’s run, his emergence as a star in net, the single biggest reason a team many predicted would not make the Stanley Cup Playoffs made it to Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Second Round, before bowing out to the Florida Panthers in the best-of-7 series on Friday.

It was, perhaps fittingly, a 2-1 defeat at TD Garden that did them in, the Bruins yet again not able to score enough goals while getting the best that Swayman could muster, 26 saves on 28 shots. He had allowed just one goal until, with 1:33 left in the third period and the game tied at 1-1, a puck off the stick of Gustav Forsling slipped between the legs of defenseman Parker Wotherspoon and just inside the post.

Which was why his teammates tried to surround him when it was all over.

“Just, don’t blame yourself,” forward Jake DeBrusk said. “A lot of guys have a lot of respect for him in this room. He got us to this point, pretty much won us the [first-round] Toronto series, kept us in that, and then extended the series for us. I know goalies feel like every mistake’s a goal, right?

“But sometimes it’s not a mistake. He covered for a lot of ours.”

They wanted him to keep his head up, to be proud of what he had done. Among goalies who played at least four games in the playoffs, Swayman has the top save percentage (.933) and the second-best goals-against average (2.15) to Nashville Predators goalie Juuse Saros (2.02 in six games).

The problem was, the Bruins couldn’t score in front of him.

“The lack of our ability to score in the playoffs in general,” coach Jim Montgomery said, of the frustrations of the series. “You can’t win every game, 2-1.”

It wasn’t that the Bruins didn’t have opportunities. They did. They had odd-man rushes and breakaways, they had missed empty nets and chances, even against a good goalie on the other side in Sergei Bobrovsky.

But, outside of a five-goal outburst in Game 1, they scored just eight goals in the final five games of the series. It was never going to be enough.

“We didn’t finish,” Montgomery said. “Outside of Game 1, did we score more than two goals?”

They did not.

In Game 6, the Bruins took the lead with 52.8 seconds remaining in the first period, a breakaway goal by Pavel Zacha that marked not only his first goal of the postseason, but his first career postseason goal in his 25th game.

They wouldn’t be able to get another, extend the lead, a hallmark of their play during the series against the Panthers.

It was, yet again, up to the goaltender to be perfect the rest of the way. It didn’t quite happen, with Anton Lundell getting the team’s first at 12:44 of the second period and then Forsling dealing the Bruins the final blow.

And, as his teammates made sure to tell him, the loss on Friday, the loss in the series, was not a marker of his value in net.

“Jeremy Swayman was terrific,” Montgomery said. “Night in, night out, gave us an opportunity to win, every night making sensational saves. His competitiveness was something that our players, and I thought our team and our bench fed off of.”

Ultimately, this Bruins team was a team that overachieved, a team that was expected to crater after losing twin franchise pillars Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci in the offseason. It was a team that was thin on offense, thin up the middle, and which overcame all that to be one of the final eight teams standing.

“That’s what I’m most proud of is these guys not taking no for an answer, since we were doubted from the beginning, losing obviously huge pieces and everyone stepping up and making a name for themselves,” Swayman said. “I would be a part of that 1,000 times over if I could.”

With Swayman in net and Brad Marchand making his return after missing Games 4 and 5 with an injury, it seemed like it might be all lined up for the Bruins to force Game 7 back in Florida, the exact way the Panthers had forced (and won) Game 7 in the two teams’ first-round series last season after being down 3-1, as the Bruins had been after Game 4.

But the Bruins and their offense came up short. And now, their season is over.

“I really can’t even put into words how proud I am of this group. From where we started, the expectations to start the season, everybody wrote us off, said we wouldn’t even be a playoff team,” Marchand said. “And we were one of the best teams in the League. We had a lot of new guys, a lot of new roles, and guys came in and we built something special.

“It started in the room and carried onto the ice. We had some hiccups along the way, but from where we started and where we finished, I couldn’t be more proud of the guys.”