Senators center Shane Pinto is skating with the team and is expected to make his season debut on Sunday versus Philadelphia after serving his 41-game gambling suspension but before he can do so, he needs to sign a contract first.
As Postmedia’s Bruce Garrioch reported in an intermission feature on TSN (video link), the team has presented several different contracts to the restricted free agent.
Many expect that the 23-year-old would sign a contract at or around his previous qualifying offer which checked in at just over $874K over the summer.
That would give him time to rebuild his value while giving the Senators, who have been up against the cap ceiling throughout the season when they haven’t been in LTIR, as much flexibility as possible.
But Garrioch notes that Ottawa has proposed a two-year term along with four-, five-, and six-year offers. A two-year bridge agreement was believed to be discussed over the offseason before the suspension was announced; at the time, the price tag for that agreement was believed to be in the low $ 2M range.
Such a move could still be palatable while allowing Ottawa to shift more of the salary into the second season, maximizing Pinto’s compensation while keeping the AAV of the deal lower.
While it was under vastly different circumstances, Washington recently took that approach when they signed UFA defenseman Ethan Bear last month.
The longer-term agreements would obviously cost more and in some cases, walk Pinto right to free agency; he is under team control through restricted free agency through the 2027-28 campaign. Speculatively, the price tag for those agreements would push more toward the $5M range which certainly wouldn’t fit in Ottawa’s salary cap structure.
If Pinto is amenable to one of those agreements, there would need to be a cap-clearing move before the contract could be registered.
Despite the various offers on the table, the one-year agreement still seems like the most plausible scenario for both sides. Pinto is coming off a 20-goal campaign but only has 99 career games under his belt so committing to a long-term agreement would come with some risk.
A one-year deal still wouldn’t make Pinto arbitration-eligible (he’s two years away as he didn’t accrue a season in 2021-22 due to injuries) but it would allow both sides more time to assess his fit on this roster. They only have a few more days to figure out which route they’ll go if they’re going to get Pinto in the lineup on Sunday.
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