Jeremy Swayman was not in Bruins’ training camp for Wednesday’s physicals. GM Don Sweeney doesn’t expect the club’s presumptive No. 1 goalie to be at Warrior Ice Arena for the start of the team’s on-ice sessions on Thursday, either. That’s not how anyone wants to start a new season.

Just how long this negotiation for a Swayman extension drags on is anyone’s guess, but the fact that Sweeney said he expects to the 25-year-old netminder will be signed “by December 1” – the cut-off date for restricted free agents like Swayman to be signed in order for him to be eligible to play this season – suggests this impasse could last a while.

While Sweeney stayed true to his usual course of action by declining to go into any details of the negotiations, he was clearly irked by what he said were inaccuracies out in the media landscape.

On the popular Spittin’ Chiclets podcast – referred to by Sweeney derisively as the “Spit-up-on-yourself” podcast – it was stated that the Sweeney hadn’t returned a call from the Swayman camp for three weeks, an assertion that the usually proper GM called “bull%$@#.”

“It’s great entertainment,” said Sweeney of the podcast, “but at the end of the day, there’s not a lot of fact-checking going on.”

Where the two sides land on a deal are up in the air. It’s believed that ask from Swayman’s camp, at least initially, was a $9.5 million on a long-term deal. Maybe they’re able to find a palatable landing spot on a long-term deal ($8-$8.5 million would seem reasonable) or they settle on a shorter bridge deal that would keep the cap hit down but also deliver Swayman to unrestricted free agency sooner.

There have been several negotiations in Sweeney’s tenure that have gone right up to or into the first week of training camp. But there have been no protracted battles that have significantly cut into a player’s training camp, never mind his regular season.

“I’ll continue to work every day. It’s not unlike David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy and Brandon Carlo and now they’re long-time Boston Bruins,,” said Sweeney, referring to players who’ve settled close to the start of camp. “It’s a process that seemingly every year there’s a few players (who aren’t camps) and this is the year that we have one. But I have to continue to do my job. I respect the position that Jeremy and his camp has taken and continue to try to find common ground.”

Sweeney said the key is to keep grinding it out with constant dialogue. He said reports that the team has been incommunicative” are “far from the truth.”

“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a person, a general manager in the league or anyone, that I’d spend three weeks and not return a phone call. So it’s constant communication, dialogue, finding common ground. Hopefully it’s no different in this case…I’ve said all along I want a negotiated deal and not an arbitration settlement and that’s the goal.”

Both sides declined to file for arbitration. Swayman took the team to arbitration in the summer of 2023, which gave him a one-year deal worth $3.475 million and some bruised feelings.

Sweeney acknowledged that with each passing day that Swayman, something is lost. He still has to develop a relationship with his backup, whether it’s Brandon Bussi or Joonas Korpisalo, obtained in the Linus Ullmark trade, and has to work with a new defenseman who should see a lot of important minutes in Nikita Zadorov.

“I will say that every day that Jeremy is out it hurts our team, it hurts our preparation that we would like to do and he needs to do, but it’s not going to stop from hoping to find common ground and getting it done,” said Sweeney. “I’m certainly not going to predict (when it gets done). I do believe that he’ll be in before December 1 because we all want him to play hockey and our team will be better for it.”