The Blue Paint: Pittsburgh Penguins goaltending controversy

On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Tyler Yaremchuk and Mike McKenna bring you another edition of The Blue Paint. They discussed the recent downtrend the Pittsburgh Penguins have taken and why Casey DeSmith could take over the starting netminder position.

Tyler Yaremchuk: The Penguins are on a bit of a slide right now and throughout this losing skid there have been points where Tristan Jarry has had to step aside and it’s been Casey DeSmith king of handling a bit more of a starter’s role. He played back-to-back games at one point here, what is going on with Pittsburgh this season? 

Mike McKenna: Well, it’s interesting, Pittsburgh went on a big slide. They lost seven games in a row, and they were looking for anything, Jeff Carter had to play defense and Mike Sullivan the Head Coach of Pittsburgh looked around like “what can I do here”. Well, he sticks  DeSmith in against Washington, and they go out and win. Then they go out and beat Toronto with DeSmith in again. Both these games with plenty of rest and so this was a conscious decision to go to a different goaltender. So,  Sullivan just said we made a decision, we’re gonna play Casey. Well, DeSmith has a career .915 save percentage and that’s really strong, he’s at a .916 SV% this year, he’s 2-3-1, and he’s had four quality starts out of six games. So, is he pushing for more passion? Yeah, I think so. The thing is Tristan Jarry has a high top end than DeSmith, we’ve seen it previously and we’ve seen him play at a .920 plus level in the save percentage to carry that club. However, we didn’t know this until recently when Jarry spoke to The Athletic after Saturday’s game against Montreal that he’s been dealing with issues and it’s affecting his play. So Jarry has been playing hurt and we find this out, it starts to make a little sense because he’s allowed 24 goals in his last five games. He hasn’t had a save percentage above .900 during that span. Whatever Jarry is battling through, hasn’t been enough to keep him out of the lineup but I really think until he’s back to 100% health you’ll see DeSmith play more often and I think the Penguins are really hoping that Jarry can find at least a couple of consistent efforts to keep him going until his body is back at 100% and he’s feeling good in the crease.

You can watch the full episode here…