BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The Penguins addressed one of their major needs and added depth elsewhere on Monday's trade deadline day.
They brought in winger Rickard Rakell from Anaheim, addressing the team's need for more depth scoring. Rakell, who had back-to-back 30-goal seasons, is expected to be promoted full-time to the Penguins' top six once he gets acclimated to the system.
The Penguins added some defensive depth, toughness and size with the addition of 6-foot-2, 205-pound defenseman Nathan Beaulieu. Beaulieu is currently injured, but is expected to be healthy for the postseason.
The only position that the Penguins didn't address in any way at the deadline is goaltending.
For the first four months of the season, it looked as if backup goaltending should be one of the top priorities at the trade deadline. Casey DeSmith started the season with a 3.57 goals-against average and a .886 save percentage through his first nine appearances. It didn't look like the Penguins were going to be able to rely on DeSmith much down the stretch of the season, potentially giving Tristan Jarry a workload that was less than ideal. And if Jarry were to falter or get hurt in the playoffs, DeSmith just didn't seem like a reliable No. 2. That would have been the end of the season.
Things got interesting in January.
When DeSmith was put on the COVID list, Louis Domingue came up from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and had an outstanding Penguins debut, posting 40 saves on 41 shots on Jan. 16 in San Jose. It looked like the backup job was going to become his to lose. Four days later, he took a shot to the right foot in a morning skate and was soon getting around the Penguins' arena on a scooter, unable to walk on that foot.
While Domingue recovered, DeSmith rebounded. He went 3-0-2 in his next six appearances, with a 2.15 goals-against average and a .933 save percentage. When Domingue was cleared to return on March 7, he was sent back to Wilkes-Barre.
Since then, DeSmith's two starts have been less-than-stellar, with a 4-1 loss in Nashville on March 15 and a 4-3 shootout loss here in Buffalo on Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, Domingue has flourished in Wilkes-Barre. He didn't miss a beat after being sidelined for a month and a half.
How exactly has DeSmith looked? And if he trends downward any further, is Domingue still an option at this point? It's tricky.
DeSmith wasn't terrible in the Penguins' loss to the Sabres Wednesday. There were stretches during the game when he looked shaky handling the puck. And there were points in the game in which he made himself look incredibly small in net.
The first instance was on the opening goal of the game from Tage Thompson. DeSmith, at 6 feet tall, is already on the shorter side for a goaltender in today's NHL. He's even shorter when he's down on both of his knees while facing a shot:
DeSmith looked small in both shootout goals he allowed, too. He gave Thompson such wide-open space to aim for, and was so low to the ice for Alex Tuch to lift the puck over him:
Asked to assess DeSmith's play in the loss, Mike Sullivan described DeSmith as "solid."
"He made some big saves for us," Sullivan said. "On the on the penalty kill he made a couple of real good ones. He was pretty solid for us all night."
DeSmith was far from the biggest reason the Penguins lost, but he certainly wasn't at his best.
Domingue, though was solid in his first five starts since returning to Wilkes-Barre.
Domingue went 4-1 in his first five games back, with four of those starts coming in two sets of back-to-backs. He posted a 1.61 goals-against average and a .952 save percentage. He had a heavy workload, facing 30-plus shots in all but one of those games, including a 37-save performance on 39 shots in his first game back. Of the eight goals he allowed in those five games, five goals were allowed on penalty kills, with the other three being at even strength.
Domingue's sixth game since returning from his injury was on Wednesday night in Toronto, and was once again part of a back-to-back set of starts. It was his first real rough game of the season, and he allowed six goals on 34 shots.
Still, it looks like Domingue might be a better option at backup than what the Penguins have now.
It's just tough to see how it would be possible to make that switch at this point in the season.
DeSmith can't go down to the AHL. For a player to be eligible to be sent to the AHL for the remainder of this season, he would have had to be on an AHL roster at 3 p.m. Monday. It isn't an issue of his waiver status, he just doesn't have AHL eligibility at this point of the season. So that's out of the question.
The 23-man roster limit in the NHL disappears after the trade deadline. The only limit teams have to adhere to is the salary cap.
The Penguins, though, don't exactly have the cap space to be carrying around three goaltenders at once. At least not for long.
Right now, the Penguins could afford to bring up Domingue. Jason Zucker is on long-term injured reserve after undergoing core muscle surgery on Jan. 25, and the Penguins are working with $4,761,861 in cap space. For as long as Zucker is out, the Penguins have cap room.
Once Zucker is back, though, they don't. They don't even have the cap room to activate Zucker as it is now. In order to activate him, the Penguins would have to clear about $740,000 in cap space. They'll presumably do that by sending their only waivers-exempt player in Radim Zohorna -- and his $750,000 cap hit -- back to Wilkes-Barre.
And no, the Penguins can't "Nikita Kucherov" this and keep Zucker on long-term injured reserve until the postseason, when there is no salary cap. Keeping a player on long-term injured reserve any longer than necessary would be salary cap circumvention, and the NHL can and will investigate those situations. The league does so regularly throughout the season, and did so with Kucherov and found that there was no misuse. We don't have a concrete timetable on Zucker's potential return, but he does seem to be getting closer. He's been skating regularly with skills coach Ty Hennes for awhile now, and he seemed to be going hard in a lengthy session I watched on Monday. He still has to return to a full practice and be cleared for full contact, but it doesn't seem like that will take the full five weeks that the Penguins have remaining in the regular season.
What the Penguins have now is what they're likely going to have to stick with. They could bring Domingue up for another tryout of sorts while they have the cap room, but it doesn't seem like that would be very advantageous when they'd still have to turn back to DeSmith as backup for the last stretch of the regular season regardless.
Barring something unforeseen like an injury, the backup job will remain DeSmith's for at least the rest of the regular season.
And as Sullivan acknowledged prior to Wednesday's game, they're going to have to turn to him quite a few times over these next five weeks.
"Casey's game is really building, we think he's getting better as the season has gone on," Sullivan said. "He's had some really good performances for us. We're going to rely on him because we're playing a lot of hockey here. We're trying to manage the workloads of both (Jarry and DeSmith), and we know he gives us a chance to win."
