CRANBERRY, Pa. -- Casey DeSmith laughed with enough force he nearly knocked over the long leg pads stacked up at his stall.
And once he settled from the willfully stupid question I'd just asked ...
"I mean, it's different for every person, right?" he began his reply. "People like to speculate about any professional athlete, 'Oh, it's his contract year, so he's going to be more motivated.' Well, uh, no. That's not how it works for everyone."
Nope. And as he spoke, DeSmith cast a glance across the Penguins' locker room on this Tuesday morning at the Lemieux Complex. Directly at his goaltending partner.
Matt Murray's contract is nearly up.
After the coming NHL season, one for which he'll be paid $3.75 million, he can be a restricted free agent, available to any of the other 30 teams via an offer sheet. RFA signings are rare, as the previous employer holds the right to match any offer. But the process alone can drive up the price dramatically, applying that much more pressure to secure an extension before it reaches that point.
From what I've been told, there's been no approach yet by Jim Rutherford to Murray or his agent, Robert Hooper of Octagon, primarily for one simple reason: There's barely any money left to discuss. Rutherford's so tight against the salary cap that he can't sign Marcus Pettersson, even though both sides apparently are amicably ready to do so. That might necessitate a trade.
Meanwhile, over the past calendar year: The Jets signed Connor Hellebuyck and the Ducks signed Whitehall's John Gibson to six-year extensions, the former at a $6.167 million average annual value, the latter at a $6.64 million AAV. In this past summer's free agency, the Panthers went bonkers for Sergei Bobrovsky, who's never won a blessed thing beyond individual awards and is now 31 years old, with seven years at $10 million AAV. Then, perhaps out of fear for what their Florida counterparts did, the Lightning extended Andrei Vasilevskiy with eight years at $9.5 million AAV.
Just a reminder for perspective: Sidney Crosby's AAV remains $8.7 million.
That's where this is headed, though. If one player at a given position breaks a bank, team executives can dismiss it as an outlier. But when it's this many, the market's been definitively moved.
It doesn't take much to see why. Although goaltending's been the game's most important position since inception, the past four Stanley Cup championships, in particular, have been claimed in large part on superiority between the pipes: Murray outperformed everyone as a rookie in 2016. Murray and Marc-Andre Fleury tag-teamed toward that same impact in 2017. Braden Holtby was brilliant for the Capitals in 2018, and Jordan Binnington carried the Blues from worst to first from the moment he reached St. Louis at season's midpoint.
As Rutherford remarked to me a month back, "That's still No. 1. That's still what you need the most to win it all."
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Murray isn't the NHL's best goaltender, but he's a No. 1 and, being blunt, he's achieved more than any of those guys I just mentioned with those big extensions, with the possible exception of Holtby. What's more, he might have flashed the finest form of his career in the final four months of the 2018-19 season. Despite save percentages of .893 and .850 in the first two months, he'd wind up at .919, a figure that ranked third in the league among all goaltenders with 50-plus starts, eighth among those with 40-plus starts.
So yeah, it's a huge winter ahead, and Murray knows it, even if he isn't wild about the subject.
"To be honest, I still have a contract for this year," he replied when I broached it after the team's informal practice on this day. "That's all that matters. I'm sure you think about it sometimes, but that's what my agent's for. He's taking care of that. That's his job. And that allows me to focus on what I need to take care of."
Come on, it won't be a thing at all?
"I mean ... look, for sure, it's something you'd like to have done. But that's how these things work. Again ... I'll let my agent take care of it."
Exactly what I expected.
Same for when I broached that extra-motivation theory that DeSmith had already dismissed.
"Yeah, I don't think I need any extra motivation. I'm pretty motivated in general."
He is. And anyone who doubts that likely hasn't spent more than a millisecond near the man near a sheet of ice. And that drive, that broader temperament hasn't changed in the slightest from that magical ascension through San Jose. It's as if he was too old for his 22 years at the time, and as if he hasn't aged since.
But that's good. For a goaltender, as anyone in the profession will attest, consistency is ideal.
So when I asked what he'd done with his summer, how he might carry over his 2018-19 play following five idle months, he came back not with hockey stuff but with stories about eloping to get married to his longtime girlfriend, the former Christina Sirignano. This was in late June, and the two told a few "friends and other people who had to know" of their plan but still took along only their two Newfoundland dogs, Beckham and Leo, to a lakehouse in Muskoka, Ontario.
This Instagram video was posted on the dogs' dedicated account, which believe it or not, has 16,000-plus humans following:
After the above scene, husband and wife further eloped ... to a nearby McDonald's.
"It was awesome," Murray recalled Tuesday. "I loved it. It was our style."
And the dogs?
"Stars of the show once again."
When I poked again at how he might carry over his 2018-19 play, all I got was, "The biggest thing is to stick to your game. For me, that means simplifying, trying to be in the right position, letting my game flow from there. That's all I ever try to worry about."
When I wondered if he might have considered adding a little weight to his pencil frame to preserve himself over a full season, all I got was, "I haven't changed anything."
It wasn't until I raised the state of the team that he perked up, and that, too, is par for the course. Like Fleury before him and going way back to Tom Barrasso, he's seen that goaltenders in Pittsburgh aren't measured by Vezinas but by Cups. He'll maintain in the middle of a season he isn't remotely aware of his own statistics, and he'll mean it.
"We've got a great team, obviously," he began, "but I don't think there's any question we can be better."
Better than being swept by the Islanders. And all the badness that went into that from the blue line and back.
"I think you have to heed the lessons from it, as a group. And the way we do that could be good for us, honestly. We're coming from a place where we got humbled last year. We didn't play the right way. There's a lot of things we can learn from that."
Or from Binnington's Blues?
"That's the way you win nowadays. It's not necessarily about who has the most skill anymore. It's about who's going to play the best team game."
And his role in that?
"I've just got to stop the puck and give my team the best chance to win."
That approach is part of what's made Murray so valuable to the Penguins. Not every goaltender would fit here. Not every goaltender has fit here. It's as Barrasso once worded, "All I've got to do is give up one less than the other guy." It's built on an understanding that the franchise is founded on skill up front -- been that way since since the 1984 -- and that those in the back need to help facilitate that.
Put it another way: If Martin Brodeur had ever come here, he'd have had a coronary after the first couple weeks.
DeSmith's been an uplifting surprise as backup, his own .916 save percentage over 30 starts last season just three ticks behind Murray's. And admirably, as he reiterated to me on this day, "My goal is to be a starter in the NHL." Maybe he'll be that. He's certainly overcome enough odds already.
But Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang are headed toward their mid-30s. This isn't the time to trifle with the backbone of what they've built. It'll be enormously expensive. My goodness, it could become the once-unthinkable in making someone other than the two superstars the team's highest-paid player, higher than Malkin's $9.5 million. That's exactly Vasilevskiy's new salary, and it's plenty realistic that Murray could outperform Vasilevskiy in the months ahead.
I tried one last time: No pressure?
"I'll feel pressure with every game I play. Same as always."
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins informal practice, Cranberry, Pa., Sept. 10, 2019 -- MATT SUNDAY / DKPS