This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Casey DeSmith
Dallas Stars Goaltender
Undrafted, a career .9093 across 163 games, and an .8946 in the season before he was signed.
| 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 | PIT | 38 | 15 | 16 | 4 | 109 | 3.17 | 0 | 1142 | .905 |
| 2023-24 | VAN | 29 | 12 | 9 | 6 | 80 | 2.89 | 1 | 759 | .895 |
| 2024-25 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 163 | 70 | 53 | 21 | 420 | 2.82 | 10 | 4629 | .909 |
This Season So Far
The 2024-25 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
Twenty-nine games in Vancouver, 12-9-6, an .8946 save percentage, a 2.89 average and 1 shutout on 759 shots.
Vancouver’s goaltending was 8th in the league last season, so the .8946 is his rather than the club’s. It is also eighty-seven points below his own career rate: a career .9093 across 163 games with 70 wins and 10 shutouts is a genuinely useful backup, and one season of 29 games is not enough to overturn it.
The Physical Game
He is 6-0 and 188 and plays deep and square rather than aggressively. He is small for a modern goaltender and the game is built on being in the right place early rather than on covering ground.
The rebound control is the weakness, and on a club with Dallas’s structure it will matter less than it did in Vancouver. Against a clean shot from the perimeter he is reliable; against a scramble in his own crease he is not.
The Mental Game
Six seasons as somebody else’s backup, in Pittsburgh, Montreal and Vancouver, and he has never been given a starter’s workload. Seventy wins in 163 games is a good record for a man who never knows when he is playing.
The .8946 came in a season where he appeared twenty-nine times behind a Vezina finalist. The role suits him and the numbers say so.
The Intangibles
Undrafted, out of Rochester, New Hampshire, four years at New Hampshire and a first game at 26. That is a hard road and 163 games is a real career at the end of it.
Dallas needs twenty-eight starts from him and needs them at .909 rather than .895. Everything else on this club is in place.
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
- he lacks itraised, and he does not have it
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.
“He is 6-0 and 188 and plays deep and square rather than aggressively.”
“The rebound control is the weakness, and on a club with Dallas's structure it will matter less than it did in Vancouver.”
“Undrafted, out of Rochester, New Hampshire, four years at New Hampshire and a first game at 26.”