I don't know how many of you fans of the Boston Bruins pay attention to college hockey, but I do have one recommendation for you if you are interested in both the Bruins and NCAA Division 1 men's college hockey.
Watching college hockey is a great way to keep tabs on some of the Bruins young prospects. The NHL is unique in that a team can have the rights to a player, even if they are an NCAA player. It's a weird system in that one would think individual NHL teams would do a better job developing their players rather than entrusting some random university to do it for them.
Anyways: college fans, check out Jeremy Swayman on UMaine.
Swayman is the starting goaltender for the UMaine Black Bears hockey team. Is UMaine a particularly strong program. No. Definitely not. But you know what? Swayman was the Bruins fourth round draft pick in 2017 -- and he is a highly productive Hockey East goaltender.
UMaine has been playing well as of late; this past weekend they played Boston University twice. Once, they beat BU and the other time, they skated to a tie.
Through eight games this season, Swayman has allowed 2.12 goals per game and owns a .942 save percentage. It looks like he's developing pretty well. Coming into this season, his career save percentage in college was a respectable .920.
Swayman is still growing and developing as a hockey player, but say he can keep up that save percentage he has going this year--or maybe even improve upon it--that could be a pretty good netminder prospect, couldn't it?
The UMaine athletics website offers free streams of their men's hockey games. I checked one out a couple of weeks back when there was not any Boston sports on and it was definitely interesting to see Swayman in action. He looked impressive.