This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Casey DeSmith

A .9146 across 27 games at 34, and the best backup season on any contender in the league.

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	DAL	27	14	8	2	65	2.59	2	761	.915
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	190	84	61	23	485	2.79	12	5390	.910

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

14-8-2 in 27 games, .9146 with a 2.59 average and 2 shutouts on 761 shots.

A better save percentage than the starter, on the same porous defensive club, in a third of the games. For a backup on a team that reached a conference final, that is as good as the job gets.

The Physical Game

6 feet and 188, which is small for a modern goaltender, and the game is built to compensate. He plays a compact, technical style — square, controlled, and reliant on reading the play early rather than on reach.

The puck-handling is a genuine asset and is used: he cuts off forechecks behind the net and makes the outlet, which for a club that concedes as many zone entries as this one is worth real minutes. What he cannot do is cover a net by simply standing in it, which is why a scramble is more dangerous against him than against Oettinger.

The Mental Game

Undrafted, ten years of being told he was too small, and a career of arriving in an organisation as the second man and outplaying the expectation.

He does not appear to be affected by a long layoff between starts, which is the actual skill in the job and the one most goaltenders never acquire. There is no record of a bad night becoming a bad month.

The Intangibles

At 34, on a cheap deal, and doing the most undervalued job on a contender: 25 starts nobody has to worry about.

The caution is age and size in combination. A .9146 at 34 from a 6-foot goaltender is an excellent season and a fragile one, and the club has no third option worth naming.

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.

puck-handlinga strength· starts the breakout himself
“The puck-handling is a genuine asset and is used: he cuts off forechecks behind the net and makes the outlet”
plays-deephe lacks it· takes the net away by occupying it
“What he cannot do is cover a net by simply standing in it, which is why a scramble is more dangerous against him than against Oettinger.”
undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, ten years of being told he was too small, and a career of arriving in an organisation as the second man and outplaying the expectation.”