Bruins’ Linus Ullmark, Jeremy Swayman rank among most dominant goalie duos

How are the Boston Bruins doing this?

After winning an NHL-record 65 games last season, they endured a summer of catastrophic personnel losses, including future Hall of Famer and six-time Selke Trophy winner Patrice Bergeron; No. 2 center David Krejci; top-four defenseman Dmitry Orlov; and top-nine left wingers Taylor Hall and Tyler Bertuzzi, among others. The band-aids brought in to replace those departures, from James van Riemsdyk to Kevin Shattenkirk, amounted to what should have been massive net losses.

The most pessimistic prognosticators pegged Boston to slide all the way out of the playoffs. Even the most optimistic projections still had them “only” winning 50 games or so.

Yet here we are, approaching U.S. Thanksgiving, and the Bruins aren’t simply still good. They aren’t simply still great. They aren’t even keeping pace with last season’s record-breaking dominance. Nope, somehow, they are exceeding it. With a .853 points percentage, they blew away last season’s .823 mark.

What’s their secret? Well, they still have David Pastrnak playing at an MVP level, not to mention future Hall of Famer Brad Marchand in the forward group and all-around horse Charlie McAvoy patrolling their blueline. But their goaltending duo of reigning Vezina Trophy winner Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman is as responsible as anything for the sustained excellence. Through Monday’s action, they have combined for a .931 save percentage. Easily tops in the NHL.

And it’s not like one Bruins netminder is dragging the other one along, doing heavier lifting to produce those sparkling team numbers. Swayman’s .933 SV% leads the NHL, but Ullmark sits tied for fifth at .928. In 5-on-5 play, they both crack the top three in the league in goals saved above average per 60 minutes.

Individually, both puck-stoppers have been instrumental to Boston’s success over the past couple of years. Ullmark was the best goalie on the planet in 2022-23, and Swayman has been as good as anyone so far this season. But when you put their performance as a duo into context? They have been historically good. Since the start of 2022-23, they sit 1-2 in SV% among NHL goalies with at least 40 games played.

How rare has Ullmark and Swayman’s joint success been over the past couple of seasons? I did some digging on some of the other greatest teammate-goalie duos in NHL history. If we evaluate the definition of an elite goaltending duo qualitatively, plenty come to mind, many of whom won championships together: Terry Sawchuk and Johnny Bower, Grant Fuhr and Andy Moog, Dominik Hasek and Chris Osgood and so on. Ullmark and Swayman haven’t earned rings together yet.

To best pinpoint how rare Ullmark and Swayman’s league-leading success is, I switched to a quantitative lens and looked at teams who placed two goaltenders in the top five in save percentage in a given season.

I restricted the parameters to include duos who played at least 25 games each (or the equivalent, 21, when teams played 70-game seasons), as we’re looking for true tandems here, not Scott Clemmensen posting a .952 SV% backing up Marty Brodeur who started 75 games. Save percentage has been (retroactively) tracked since 1955-56, but I drew solely from post-expansion teams in the research, as the six-team goalie landscape was pretty much a different universe, with the likes of Glenn Hall starting 500-plus games in a row, while the second-worst save percentage in the NHL would crack the top five in the Original Six Days when most teams didn’t play backups at all.

So how difficult, post-expansion, has it been to place two teammates in the top five in save percentage with both playing more than a quarter of the season?

In the early expansion days, it wasn’t that uncommon. Bruce Gamble and Johnny Bower both posted .934s as Toronto Maple Leafs to co-lead the league in 1967-68. The 1968-69 St. Louis Blues had Jacques Plante and Hall posting a .940 and .928, respectively, forming arguably the greatest crease duo in hockey history. The accomplishment happened six times in the 1970s. In the ’70s and ’80s, Hall of Famer Billy Smith accomplished the feat seven times on the dynastic New York Islanders with partners Glenn ‘Chico’ Resch and Rollie Melanson.

As NHL expansion blew up in the early 1990s and thus watered down the overall talent pool, however, it became far less common for teams to own two elite goalies at the same time in the same season. From 1967-68 through 1990-91, 18 teammate duos cracked the top five in save percentage in the same season across 23 years. Since the franchise pool began increasing in 1991-92 to 22 teams and beyond? It’s happened just eight times in 31 years. The only duos to accomplish it since 2010-11 are Robin Lehner and Thomas Greiss of the 2018-19 New York Islanders and Ullmark and Swayman last year.

If Ullmark and Swayman continue their all-star-caliber play this season, they could become just the fourth pair of teammates since expansion to crack the top five in save percentage more than once – and the first since Patrick Roy and Brian Hayward of the Montreal Canadiens did it twice in the late 1980s.

So while the Bruins’ sustained success has obviously been the result of overall team play, the importance of their goalie duo, and the extreme rarity of its success, can not be overstated. What Ullmark and Swayman are accomplishing is by no means normal, especially in the era of 32 teams, some of whom carry as many as three NHL goaltenders at once.