Casey Desmith Isn’t A Problem, He’s The Problem

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; it’s the second half of the season and “Here come the Pittsburgh Penguins”. The Pens have won nine straight games as of this article and have been one of the best teams five-on-five in the entire league. After a slow start, the Penguins have found their stride, led by their aging core players finding their strive once again, breakout players like Danton Heinen and Evan Rodrigues, and good goaltending. Well, good starting-goaltending. The Penguins are one of the best teams in the league and have but one glaring weakness;  backup goaltender Casey Desmith.

Casey Desmith has been bad, to say the least. Desmith, who got unconventionally pulled after giving up a third against the St. Louis blues, has struggled throughout most of his appearances as the Pens’ backup this season. The game prior, Desmith allowed five goals on 27 shots and almost single-handedly blew a huge lead for his team. In eight starts, Desmith has failed to post a save percentage above .900 in six of them. Once Desmith was out of the game, the Penguins stormed back to get a come-from-behind win against a very good ST. Louis Blues team, and Tristan Jarry, who came in for relief, did not allow a goal in the process. The Pens are extremely lucky that Jarry has been performing at the level he is, especially considering how bad Desmith has been.

I’m not unrealistic about a backup goalie, I’m not asking Desmith to play at an all-star level, but I do expect better play than this. Desmith is currently sitting in the bottom half of every single goaltending metric you can think of, including being in the bottom half of the league in goals-saved-above-expected. I think it is reasonable to expect your backup goalie to be around the league average in terms of GSAA and save percentage, which Desmith currently isn’t even close to.

Josh Yohe, of The Athletic, tweeted out during the game that he thought that Mike Sullivan was sending a message to not only Desmith, but the team, with the quick pull after the third goal allowed. Sullivan probably isn’t and shouldn’t be happy with the way his backup has played. You also have to wonder how the team’s confidence is affected going forward when Desmith gets a start.

The problem going forward is the Penguins can’t start Trtistan Jarry (Who has been fantastic) every game and there’s really no other realistic option within the organization at the moment. The third goalie on the depth chart is Louis Dominigue, who has started a whopping two games since 2020 and has a career save percentage of just .904. Not a great situation.

Although I’ll agree that general manager Ron Hextall has done a nice job putting this team together with very limited assets and cap space to work with, most fans and analysts were calling for him to bring in a veteran backup in the offseason and he failed to pull the trigger. I was calling for them to get another goalie even before Desmith started to regress just in case Jarry implodes in the playoffs again or gets injured. Now they have to get a veteran guy to not waste this team and the season they’re having.

Now his job to his to pull the trigger before it’s too late. Between Covid, injuries, and fatigue, the Penguins will need to call upon someone other than Jarry, and they can’t afford to keep trotting out Desmith and lose out on precious points. Usually this time of year you would see people calling for the Penguins to trade for a top-six winger, but this year their team is fine, other than the backup goaltending position.