Some Thoughts about Jake Oettinger and Casey DeSmith in March

Goaltending is different

Something I’ve come to appreciate more than ever about hockey over the last couple of years is just how incredibly different goaltenders are, because they have to be.

Like starting pitchers in baseball, hockey assigns a goalie wins and losses, implicitly declaring that the netminder bears ultimate responsibility for the outcome of the game. This year, Jake Oettinger has gone 28-10-5, while Casey DeSmith has posted a line with exactly half the regulation wins and losses of Oettinger at 14-5-5.

Those are objectively great numbers for any goaltender, let alone for two on the same club. But we know too much to stop there. Because goaltending isn’t about what you did last time, but about what you do on the next shot. Hockey is a team sport, but goals are rarely viewed as team breakdowns by fans in the moment, when a goalie’s shoulders slump as a blinking red light illuminates the glass behind him as if to say this guy messed up, this guy right here. It’s the path of least reistance to blame the last guy who had a shot at preventing the goal, even if he had far from the best chance to do so.

Of course, sometimes the goalie does bear that ultimate responsibility, and rightly so. Take the first Utah goal the other night, for example. It’s one Casey DeSmith would want back:

I had a chance to chat with DeSmith about this goal yesterday, and I was struck by how matter-of-fact he was about it.

DeSmith agreed that it’s a goal he can’t allow, but it was also abundantly clear in talking with him that this is a goalie with a .907 save percentage in a year when the best goalies in the league are barely hitting .915. DeSmith is having a very good year, and he knows as well as anyone that a goal like that one isn’t indicative of his ability, but rather the result of a few different decisions by a few different people, himself first and foremost.