Ottawa Senators Top 25 Under 25, #4: Shane Pinto

Last Year: 5

Reader Rank: 4

We’ve moved on to the true cream of the crop for this year’s Ottawa Senators Top 25 Under 25 rankings. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Shane Pinto was unanimously voted 4th by our staff, and the readers agreed with us.

Pinto is coming off a bit of a weird season. This time last year, we were worried about how the Sens would clear up cap space for his next contract, and then that problem solved itself when he got handed a 41 game suspension for gambling-related activities. 

Trevor went through Pinto’s 2023-24 advanced stats in his report card piece, so I’ll direct you to that article for a more in-depth look at how Pinto’s most recent season went, but the tl;dr is that his stats were good! After coming back from his 41 game suspension, he was one of the better players on the team, and even had the best expected goals percentage. The underlying numbers say that he played perfectly well in the top six, and was pretty unlucky to not actually score even more than he did.

You can see here that he generally had a positive impact on his teammates - anything above and to the right of the red line is good, because being higher up on the graph means the player does well defensively, and being to the right means they do well offensively. The graph shows that he did well with pretty much every linemate.

Both those things are especially good to know given that his underlying numbers were not particularly good in his rookie season, when he struggled at 5v5 especially. It’s entirely possible that his main problem that year was that he didn’t mesh well with Alex DeBrincat. Let’s hope it was that, because that problem has obviously been solved.

One thing that stands out when comparing Pinto’s play in 2022-23 to his play in 2023-24 is his finishing ability. Even when his line was under performing, Pinto was one of the Sens’ best goalscorers in 2022-23. Much like Josh Norris, Pinto was becoming known as a centre who was more of a finisher than a playmaker, able to find the back of the net but not quite able to drive play. However, this past season paints a different picture; one where Pinto did pretty much everything right but couldn’t quite convert on all the chances he got. Hopefully, that means he’s worked on the aspects of his game that needed work after his rookie season, and the lack of goals was just a bit of regression to the mean. The real Shane Pinto is probably somewhere in between the versions of him we saw in those first two seasons. A goal-scorer who can credibly play at both ends of the ice is a real boon to any team.

As we all know, Pinto’s role on the Sens going forward will depend largely on Josh Norris’s health. If Norris can both stay healthy and play like he did before these shoulder injuries started, he may end up ahead of Pinto in the depth chart, most likely centering the second line. That would push Pinto to the third line, which is a role he has historically done very well in. There's also maybe a chance he slots on to the wing in the top six, but that seems like a less likely outcome.

I feel we’ve been saying this for years now, but it would be nice to see another full season from Shane Pinto. He’s played well in every season so far but he'll be 24 before the end of the year and he's only appeared in 140 NHL games; there is still an element of the unknown. It remains to be seen if he has another level or if he’ll cap out as a very good third line centre.

If it ends up being the latter, that’s still great; a third line centre who’s slightly too good for the third line and can play up if necessary is a very valuable asset to a competitive team. The bridge deal he signed this summer gives him time to prove himself and show us exactly where he belongs in the lineup.