BUFFALO, N.Y. -- There's no shortage of problems plaguing the Penguins on this six-game skid.
It's a streak that now includes consecutive games of squandered multi-goal leads, following the Penguins' 6-3 loss to the Sabres here in Buffalo on Wednesday night.
No one player can shoulder the blame for any one of those losses. Everyone needs to be better. Defensive breakdowns, high-risk hockey, an inability to score goals, poor discipline, incomplete efforts have all been an issue at one point or another in this losing streak.
Goaltending probably wouldn't even crack the top-5 faults that have led to this current hole the Penguins find themselves in. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't stand to be better, either.
Wednesday's loss was a representation of that. Casey DeSmith was far from the reason the Penguins' lost this one, but he didn't exactly do them many favors.
The Sabres' second and third goals are perhaps the best examples of that. It's quite uncommon to see a goaltender provide the opponent with such a completely wide-open net once in a game, let alone twice.
The Penguins were holding onto a 3-1 lead early in the third period when a tripping penalty on DeSmith put the Sabres on the power play. It took less than a minute for the Sabres to capitalize on that man advantage. Rasmus Dahlin, quarterbacking the power play from the point, sets up Tage Thompson for a one-timer blast from the left circle:
DeSmith wasn't anywhere close to being in position to being able to stop that. This was Thompson's view of the net when he got the puck. Totally unobstructed:
That brought the Sabres back within one goal. Then less than three minutes later, it happened again.
Owen Power faked a shot before passing the puck to Victor Olofsson at the right circle. By the time DeSmith realized what had happened, he was already drawn too far over to the right of the crease to even have a hope of stopping it:
Again, that's a wide-open net:
Is that 100% on DeSmith? No. The Penguins had the opportunity to clear the puck out of their end just before the goal. Brian Dumoulin is also allowed to block a shot there.
DeSmith wasn't in the locker room during postgame media availabilities to speak about the performance.
DeSmith is still searching for his first win of the season after this one, falling to 0-3-1 with a .904 save percentage and 3.25 goals-against average.
Mike Sullivan was asked after the game if the team could stand to get a big save or a big period out of a goaltender right now, and Sullivan was hesitant to criticize DeSmith after this game.
"I thought Casey competed hard tonight," Sullivan said. "He made some stops for us. The goals that they got were pretty good looks. So I don't know if that was the case. Tonight, I just think we've got to be better as a team."
Sullivan continued by saying that the Penguins need to get their "swagger back" in their game.
"When you go through struggles like this, we're all human beings, everybody cares," he said. "Everybody wants to be part of the solution. We've got to go back to work, we've got to make sure that we reset our mindset here and figure out what we can take from this one. This one stinks without a doubt. But we're going to have to figure out what we can take from it and try to become a better team."
DeSmith's play is a microcosm of what's plaguing the whole team right now. You can't point a finger at DeSmith or any one player and say he is 100% responsible for a loss, or even one goal. But what we're seeing is far from his best, and the faults are piling up from player-to-player, game-to-game to snowball into the six-game skid the Penguins find themselves on.
Everyone needs to get their swagger back, and the goaltending is no exception.
