It’s not a question Shane Pinto expected to be facing this early in his hockey career: “Will you be turning pro after just one year in the NCAA?”
On Thursday, he gave the Ottawa Senators his answer.
Pinto will return for a second season at the University of North Dakota, he told The Athletic on Thursday afternoon.
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Still, you can understand why the prospect of seeing Pinto in a Senators jersey (either Belleville or Ottawa) sooner than later had been on the minds of fans and media members.
Less than a year after being drafted higher than expected, Pinto has excelled at the college level with the UND Fighting Hawks. He led the top-ranked college team in the country in scoring, won the NCHC rookie of the year award and was a standout performer for Team USA at the World Junior Championships.
He’s become a well-known commodity in the Senators world. And now the conversation for a 19-year-old, who by all accounts should be thinking about another year of school, has rapidly changed to questions about starting his professional career. His rookie NCAA campaign exceeded even Pinto’s ambitions.
“Obviously you set expectations for yourself, but if they told me what I did this year, I’d be pretty surprised,” he said in a phone interview last week. “Knowing how hard of a league it is and how many good players there are in our league, to win the awards that I won, it’s pretty cool.”
A handful of his UND teammates have also announced their intention to return to school rather than sign NHL contracts, including Jacob Bernard-Docker, the Senators’ 2018 first-round pick.
In a recent interview, Pinto expressed disappointment about not being able to see through what was shaping up to be a special season at UND. COVID-19 stopped the NCAA season with the Fighting Hawks riding high. Finding out they would not be able to play for a national title, which they were favourites to win, was difficult.
“That crushed all of us,” Pinto said. “But there’s going to be a belief within each other that we have a chance to do it again.”
Pinto, who went 32nd overall in the 2019 NHL Draft, has consistently blown past expectations this season, to the point where it sometimes feels like he came out of nowhere.
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And in some ways, he has. Pinto has followed a unique path to become one of the Senators’ most anticipated prospects. It’s a road that Pinto says not many people know about.
“This is going into Year 8 (for me) in the USHL,” said Pinto’s former junior coach Chris Michael. “And I can probably count on one hand, how many times that there has been a story like Shane Pinto.”
Until he was 15 years old, Shane Pinto dreamed of playing for the Philadelphia Phillies.
His dad played college baseball. His mom played college softball, and so does his older sister. A young Pinto followed in his family’s footsteps. He was a competitive shortstop, who played house league hockey for fun, and football on the side.
“I wanted to be a Major League Baseball player,” Pinto laughed. “I never thought I’d be playing hockey.”
But that changed for Pinto when he was 15. He started watching the Pittsburgh Penguins on TV more often. In fact, he said he watched almost every game that year, which culminated in the team’s second Stanley Cup of the Sidney Crosby era.
He started watching highlight videos of Crosby (and Winnipeg Jets forward Mark Scheifele) online.
“I remember thinking if I believe in myself and I work really hard, why can’t I be (like Crosby) one day?” he said. “Something just got lit inside me, and ever since then I’ve worked really hard and I just love the game so much.”
He started playing more competitive hockey and enrolled at Selects Hockey Academy, a private school with a triple-A hockey program. But Pinto was still relatively unknown compared to players his age who had been playing at a high-level for years.
So, at the 2017 USHL entry draft, Pinto, then 16, was taken in the 21st round, 330th overall, by the Lincoln Stars.
“When you pick a guy at that number, you’re taking a chance on the kid,” Michael said. “And if it doesn’t work out at 330, nobody is upset because it’s not like it’s your first-round pick not panning out.”
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He was, in a way, an afterthought. Only 18 players were selected after him. Only two of those players played even a partial season in the USHL.
Pinto didn’t make the Lincoln Stars roster for the 2017-18 season. Instead, he spent that season back with the Selects Academy on a midget team on which he finished second in team scoring with 65 points in 54 games on the team’s way to a national championship.
Michael said that year was Pinto’s “coming out party.” Then the next training camp with the Stars, he said a stronger, improved Pinto caught his coaches’ eyes “immediately.”
“We could tell that this kid was going to be something special,” Michael said. “But I would hate to sit here and lie to you and tell you we thought he was going to be a point-a-game guy in the first 30 games in Year 1 in the USHL.”
In those first 30 games as Lincoln’s No. 1 centre, Pinto scored 17 goals and 32 points.
But with the Stars in last place at the trade deadline, Pinto was dealt to the Tri-City Storm, affording him a much-needed playoff run to boost his NHL draft stock.
“The USHL playoffs are very difficult, so scouts really truly see what those players are in the playoffs,” Michael said. “We knew it was important for us to get him on a team that is going to play in the playoffs and go for a little bit of a run.”
Under coach Anthony Noreen with the Storm, Pinto continued to lead rookies in scoring – he netted 11 goals and 27 points in 26 games – but he also improved his overall game.
“One of the things him and I talked a lot about was to make sure that the things that are totally within his control are never questioned by the eyes in the stands,” Noreen said.
He knew Pinto was going to score, he’s always had a knack for that. But what Noreen wanted was for him to make plays every shift, with or without the puck. In the span of a few months, Pinto made big strides. He became more physical and he was generally quite difficult to play against, Noreen said, adding that Pinto is the “poster boy” for how players develop at different rates, and how quickly someone can improve if they work hard and are coachable.
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“He’s just a kid who doesn’t know any different than to show up and work every day,” he said. “By the end of the year, he was just clicking on all cylinders. I think the way he played at the end of the year had a big part in him getting drafted so high because he was playing a man’s game.”
Still, when the Senators took Pinto with the 32nd pick in 2019, criticism rolled in quickly.
Media and fans questioned GM Pierre Dorion’s decision to leave higher-ranked prospects such as Arthur Kaliyev and Bobby Brink on the board and picking a relative unknown in Pinto.
For example, one report said, “When compared to the prospects left on the board, the Senators’ first three picks seem like a downgrade, most of all Pinto.”
Dorion later told local Ottawa media that his scouts were adamant that Pinto was the right player for them.
Over the years, a lot of people have asked Brad Berry, the longtime UND coach, if players he’s recruited have “exceeded expectations.” And Pinto is no exception.
“He progressively got better and better, and better as the season went on,” he said. “And that tells me that this young man, he’s got a lot more to give and he’s going to get to a level that’s even higher than what is portrayed here.”
Pinto had a terrific rookie season with the Fighting Hawks. He finished the year with a team-high 16 goals and 28 points in 33 games. And he was named the National Collegiate Hockey Conference’s rookie of the year at the end of March, again beating out Brink who is at Denver. Pinto also led Team USA in scoring at the World Juniors.
At UND, he was an important player at 5-on-5 as the team’s second-line centre and on the power play. He was also trusted by his coaches to take faceoffs while on the penalty kill and eventually got meaningful PK minutes. Overall, he was one of the top centres in the faceoff circle in the NCHC.
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Pinto certainly has proven a lot in one year in the NCAA.
Dorion saw it first hand this year, first at a game in Minnesota with UND and then at the world juniors with Team USA.
“He’s even better than we anticipated,” Dorion told TSN 1200 in January. “We saw UND in Minnesota and I couldn’t believe how good he and Bernard-Docker were and then getting the chance to see both, but especially Pinto play for the U.S. and the impact he had on that team …
“He did a lot of great things that tell you this guy is going to be a really good NHL player down the road.”
His coaches and scouts will tell you, it’s the way Pinto plays the game that sets him apart. He has a knack for scoring goals, but he does so much more than that, which would help ease the transition to the next level.
Often in the AHL you hear about prolific scorers, but their defence is lacking. Or they don’t have that “200-foot” game. Pinto’s coaches say he has it all.
“He respects the game. He understands that if you don’t have the puck then you have to be good defensively, you have to be responsible and accountable and if you want to play at that level, you have to be relied upon and give your coach a reason to play you,” said Michael. “There’s not a lot of second-round picks in the National Hockey League that have the complete game at his age. They are learning it still or they truly learn it in the American League.”
Fan interest in Pinto has risen this year. You see it in the questions and comments and highlight videos on social media. But there are a lot of reasons for him to return to the UND.
Pinto is only 19, and in a way, has only been playing elite-level hockey for four years. One really great season in what has been a rapid ascent doesn’t mean he is totally ready. What’s the rush?
Not to mention, freshmen rarely make the jump from the NCAA to the AHL or NHL.
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Even high-end prospects like Cale Makar and Quinn Hughes played at least two years in college before jumping to the NHL. Senators prospect Josh Norris played two years at Michigan before going to the AHL. Fellow Senators prospect and teammate Jacob Bernard-Docker is going back, too, despite being a year older, citing that he knows there is more on the table for their team.
This season, UND went 26-5-4. For returning players, motivation to be back on top next year will be high.
“These young men poured their hearts out the whole year, it was blood, sweat, and tears to do something special, and they did. Everything we asked them to do within their control they did,” Berry said. “The only thing they didn’t do was win a national title, and that was out of their control.”
Because of the latter, Pinto said there is “absolutely” a sense of unfinished business among the team.
“I think of a guy who’s about to win the Hobey Baker, Jordan Kawaguchi,” he said. “He’s coming back because he has that unfinished business feeling and I feel the same way with it.”
Pinto joins a handful of returning teammates for next season. In addition to Bernard-Docker and Kawaguchi (free agent), Matt Kiersted (free agent), Collin Adams (Islanders prospect) and Grant Mismash (Predators prospect) have all pledged to go back to school.
“We have a very good team next year as well. We’re going to want to end it off the right way, so yeah there’s definitely that motivation to finish what we started here this year.”
Berry said he thinks the unfinished business is just one reason why players are returning. More importantly, he said, they are returning because of self-awareness.
“I think they’re fully mature and know how hard the NHL is,” he said. “And I think they want to try to set themselves up the best that they can to not only get there but sustain that and stay there a long, long time and be an impactful player on that level.“
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Despite all his success, the accolades and praise from his coaches, Pinto is not complacent. With his return to UND official, he knows he will need to keep improving for when he does make the jump to the pros.
“To just get that little bit of recognition is obviously pretty cool,” he said. “But there’s a lot of work left to be done. It’s only one year in college and next year I’m going to have to have a better year.”
(Photo: Richard A. Whittaker / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
