Charlie McAvoy and Jeremy Swayman are among the best at their positions, and the NHL Network has them side-by-side in its league-wide rankings.
On Sunday night, the NHL Network revealed the first 10 names on its Top 50 Players Right Now list, starting with No. 50 and finishing with No. 41. Two Boston Bruins landed on the first part of the list, with Jeremy Swayman ranked 42nd and Charlie McAvoy in front of him at No. 41.
McAvoy, who ranked No. 38 in last year’s list, fell back three spots after posting career highs in assists (50) and points (61). His slight drop did not lead to much criticism from NHL Network analysts Tony Luftman, Mike Rupp, and Mike Johnson, who were full of praise for McAvoy during Sunday night’s reveal show.
“He’s so unique because he does everything well. He does everything well, and some of the things that some players do well, like, I don’t know, get 50 assists as a defenseman, generally aren’t physically imposing. He is,” Rupp said. “What do you need? He plays through injuries; we’ve seen that. He’s nuts. The absolute warrior that he is.”
“The only thing, for me, that from watching Charlie McAvoy, sometimes gets him in trouble, [is] because he cares too much,” Rupp added. “Sometimes he tries to do a little bit too much. When he just goes and plays his game, he is a difference maker.”
Even if Rupp believes McAvoy tries to do too much, he does everything for the Bruins. He averaged 24:23 of ice time per night last season, and he has led the Bruins in that category in seven of the last eight seasons. There has never been a year where McAvoy has averaged less than 22 minutes of ice time per night. He also punches in minutes on both the power play and penalty kill, and finished the 2025-26 season with a career-high 23 power play points (2-21–23).
“Underrated offensively. You think about Charlie McAvoy, I think people’s first thought goes to all the stuff. The physical play, the defense, the leadership, the emotion, all that stuff,” Mike Johnson said. “You’re like, wait a second, 50 assists? That’s a big, big number for a defenseman.”
“He does it all for the Boston Bruins, and he also seems to represent the next person in the line of leadership, who the Boston Bruins want to be as a club […] He’s the guy who plays hard, he’s physical, he’s in your face, he’s the kind of player that the Bruins fans want to get behind and the Bruins organization wants to represent them.”
There may not be one specific part of McAvoy’s game that defines him, and Mike Johnson believes that’s exactly what separates him from other defensemen in the league.
“If you want to talk about the best all-around guys, who can bring it [on] both ends, he’s one of the best in the world.”
Jeremy Swayman did not rank in the top 50 last season, but landed at No. 49 entering the 2024-25 season. He’s back on the list after a bounce-back season, and he was the first goaltender revealed in the top 50.
Swayman finished the year with 31 wins, topping his previous career-high of 25. He posted a .908 save percentage and a 2.71 goals against average, but he led the league in games started with a save percentage above .900 with 38. His third-place finish in Vezina Trophy voting only hints at how impactful he was to the Bruins last season, and how much of a role he played in helping the black and gold get back into the postseason.
“[The Bruins] were really driven by their great goalie. And Jeremy Swayman, you can talk about the goals saved above expected; you look at the traditional numbers here, [shows] how impactful he was on their team’s success,” NHL Network analyst Mike Johnson said. “This is what a great goalie can do. They can take an average team and make them an above-average team, and that’s really what he did last year for Boston.”
According to MoneyPuck, Swayman finished with 28.8 goals saved above expected, second to Washington’s Logan Thompson. That marked a 37.9-goal improvement from the 2024-25 season, when he finished with a minus-9.1 GSAx.
“When you’re talking about goals saved above expected, generally speaking, since we started tracking this, it comes from teams that don’t really defend well, because that shows that the goaltenders are seeing stuff they probably shouldn’t see,” Mike Rupp said on the reveal show. “It’s not always that case, but when you see this situation, Boston, if they can’t improve the defensive game, get a little more predictable, he’s shown that he could be a difference maker.”
Just two weeks ago, the NHL ranked Swayman as the fifth-best goaltender in the league right now. Mike Rupp went on to call the position “one of the hardest, most polarizing positions in all of sports,” and continued, saying that remaining consistent year over year is one of the toughest things to do as a goaltender.