After being acquired right before training camp, Casey DeSmith had a solid season between the pipes for Vancouver. However, it appears it will be one and done for his time with the Canucks as Rick Dhaliwal of CHEK and The Athletic reported in a recent appearance on Sportsnet 650 (audio link) that there have been no contract talks for the pending unrestricted free agent and that the team is likely to go with Arturs Silovs as their backup next season.
Vancouver acquired the 32-year-old from Montreal in mid-September, sending winger Tanner Pearson and a 2025 third-round pick the other way. In doing so, they were able to get an upgrade behind starter Thatcher Demko while also freeing up $1.45MM in cap space.
DeSmith played in 29 games during the regular season where he posted a 2.89 GAA and a .895 SV%, the latter number being a career low. Nonetheless, that still represented a considerable upgrade over the .871 mark from Spencer Martin and .882 from Collin Delia back in 2022-23. DeSmith also made a pair of playoff appearances following Demko’s injury before being injured himself. That gave the net to Silovs who took the net and ran with it for the rest of Vancouver’s postseason.
While Silovs is also a pending free agent, it stands to reason that he’ll earn a fair bit less on his next contract than DeSmith. Silovs is only eligible for restricted free agency and with just 19 career NHL appearances (regular season and playoffs combined), they should be able to get him signed on a short-term bridge contract around the $1MM range. Those savings could be useful as they look to try to re-sign some of their key pending unrestricted free agents, highlighted by Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov.
As for DeSmith, despite his lower save percentage, he could be in line for a raise from the $1.8MM he made in each of the last two years. It’s not a great free agent class for goaltenders and there’s a good chance several backups will be moving around. That should create enough openings for there to be a market for DeSmith’s services once the market opens up on July 1st.
Eh, trade Demko for a haul and run with Sillovs and sign a guy like Ned for $2M+ x 2 And re-sign Lindholm, Hronek and maybe even Z!
DeSmith is Degone after Silovs proved himself. Right after Vancouver finished up, everybody knew that.
Heck 2 games in everybody knew that.
With Lindholm pricing himself out and Zad not getting the love he wants…this is looking better for Calgary lol
7 years for Lindholm, I’m not sure that will age well.
The Lindholm rumours are scary; the window has just opened & based on his regular season (admittedly maybe his worst since his rookie year) he’s worth 4.5-5.5m max. Committing much more than a 4 year term is crazy. Let Boston make that mistake IMO
(scritches his head) How is a .895 save percentage “solid”? There were only ten goalies last season playing as many or more games as DeSmith who had worse. That he was an upgrade over the slop who backed Demko up the season before doesn’t make him anywhere in the vague vicinity of ‘solid’.
Silovs backed up Martin and Delia for 5 games and had a .908 average