This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Casey DeSmith
Pittsburgh Penguins Goaltender
Undrafted, a career .9153 across 2,728 shots, and never more than thirty-six games in a season.
| Season | Team | GP | W | L | OTL | GA | GAA | SO | SA | SV% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | PIT | 14 | 6 | 4 | 1 | 28 | 2.40 | 1 | 356 | .921 |
| 2018-19 | PIT | 36 | 15 | 11 | 5 | 89 | 2.75 | 3 | 1060 | .916 |
| 2020-21 | PIT | 20 | 11 | 7 | 0 | 48 | 2.54 | 2 | 543 | .912 |
| 2021-22 | PIT | 26 | 11 | 6 | 5 | 66 | 2.79 | 3 | 769 | .914 |
| 2022-23 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 96 | 43 | 28 | 11 | 231 | 2.67 | 9 | 2728 | .915 |
This Season So Far
The 2022-23 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
26 games, 11-6-5, a .9142 save percentage and a 2.79 goals-against, three shutouts on 769 shots. That is 16th of the 53 goaltenders who played twenty-five games. Undrafted, and ninety-six NHL games at a .9153 career save percentage out of it.
The Physical Game
6-0 and 188 pounds, which is small for a modern goaltender and the lightest of the three in this chapter.
Four seasons, and every one of them between .9116 and .9213. .9213 across 356 shots, .9160 across 1,060, .9116 across 543, .9142 across 769.
Ninety-seven points of spread across an entire career is remarkably little, and the career figure of .9153 sits above Tristan Jarry’s .9149.
Three shutouts in twenty-six games is the same number Jarry produced in fifty-eight.
The Mental Game
Pittsburgh rated 9th in the league in goaltending at plus-5.8, from two goaltenders who were within half a point of each other. Jarry .9193 and DeSmith .9142, 6th and 16th of the fifty-three.
The skaters were 7th in the league in chance share and spent less time short-handed than all but two clubs, so both figures were produced behind an unusually helpful structure and neither is a portable claim.
Ninety-six NHL games across four seasons is what a career backup looks like, and the club has now added Dustin Tokarski behind him.
The Intangibles
Nothing in the file speaks to technique or how he plays a rebound, and 769 shots would not settle it if the fields existed.
What it measures is 2,728 career shots at .9153 from an undrafted 31-year-old who has never played more than thirty-six games in a season. The consistency is the whole argument — four seasons inside a hundred-point band is a rarer thing than one good year.
A club with a 27-year-old starter at .9149 and a 31-year-old backup at .9153 has the least interesting goaltending question in this batch, and given what Ottawa and Philadelphia are carrying, that is worth something.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
“Undrafted, and ninety-six NHL games at a .9153 career save percentage out of it.”