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Perhaps Sam Reinhart and his agent looked at what the Washington Capitals gave forward Tom Wilson this off season and had visions of the Buffalo Sabres forward signing for similar money. Wilson signed a six-year deal with the Caps for an AAV of $5.166 million following a season where he scored 14 goals and 35 points in 78 regular season games.
In a tale of two Sams, Reinhart's 2017 portion of last season had him at a pace that would produce far less than Wilson while in 2018 Reinhart was nearly a point/game player which far exceeded what Wilson produced. In the end the Sabres forward finished the last year of his entry-level deal with a nice, symmetric 25 goals and 25 assists in 82 games for Buffalo.
Maybe forgotten in all of this is that although Wilson never reached top-six status on the Capitals, he was one of their best players in the playoffs while helping Washington to their first-ever Stanley Cup. And at 24 yrs. old, he's just begun to hit the middle of his prime and still has a lot of tread on the tire.
Then again, maybe Reinhart and his agent looked at Buffalo's preseason game last night and liked what they saw enough to say that they can safely bet on some good seasons with this Buffalo Sabres club. Center Jack Eichel showed a little rust but also showed flashes of his typical dominance that reverberated throughout the entire team. We saw 18 yr. old defenseman Rasmus Dahlin skating like the breeze and sending tape-to-tape passes with the poise of a veteran. Those were just two of the players Reinhart should be on the ice with this preseason but a holdout on his part prevented that.
Now he can join them.
The Buffalo Sabres announced that Reinhart signed a 2yr./$7.3 million dollar contract with the club. Reinhart, the second-overall pick in 2014, will make $3.55 million this year and $3.75 million in 2019-20.
At only 22 yrs. old Reinhart has a lot of upside but, unlike Wilson, we're really not sure who he is right now.
Reinhart was drafted as a center but was moved to wing by former head coach Dan Bylsma. He played extremely well there, especially alongside Eichel, and was good for 40 goals and 49 assists in the two seasons Bylsma was head coach. New head coach Phil Housley liked the idea of Reinhart playing his natural position and moved him back to center last season. It was a disaster and he was moved back to wing. Beginning with the Winter Classic on New Year's Day, that move really took hold and Reinhart went on a tear that would see him score 37 points in 38 games.
"Throughout the season you kind look for a spark," Reinhart told the press about the Winter Classic in hindsight weeks later, "and that’s probably the spot where you can look back and see things started turning around because I did feel good."
But there was more to it than that. At locker cleanout day he had this to say of his Saul-to-Paul transformation, "The biggest thing for me was, I wasn't happy with the way anything was going and I just said to myself, 'Screw it, I'm playing my game,." he told the gathered press that day. "I think it's more important for me to play my game, it's more beneficial to me and the team. I think it was important for me to get back to what I do best."
Although we're not sure whether "playing my game" meant him finding that game within himself and within coach Housley's system or whether it was a stealth deviation from Housley's system that got him going, whatever it was, something clicked. After that strong finish one would think that he and his agent had the mindset that he'd passed through some threshold and was ready for a big contract.
However, it would seem as if Buffalo GM Jason Botterill and the Sabres brass thought differently.
Rumors of a stalemate with the Sabres offering $5 million and Reinhart wanting $6 million had many believing the end result would be somewhere within that range. But from a team perspective it never really made a lot of sense to pay that much to a player whom they weren't 100% sure about.
Reinhart has a lot of skill and much of his talent is subtle, but one of the big knocks on him is his speed. He has average to slightly above average skating ability and the main reason he was able to keep up with the likes of Eichel, and to an extent Ryan O'Reilly, was his smarts and vision. Reinhart is always a step or two ahead of the play and can either get to where he needs to go or get the puck to where it needs to go to play faster.
In addition, when he was drafted out of Kootenay of the Western Hockey League, Reinhart was seen more as a set-up guy from the middle but that didn't really transfer to the NHL. Bylsma put him in a position to succeed by putting him on the wing in more of a scorer's role while also putting him in front of the net on the powerplay. The result was a 23-goal rookie season. That would flip-flop next season as he scored only 17 goals but was good for 30 assists.
Reinhart will have plenty of time to show his worth and at the end of two years the Sabres will be out from under a couple of unfriendly contracts and will have begun to galvanize their core. Right now, CapFriendly has the Sabres with only six contracts for 2020-21 with Eichel, Kyle Okposo and Patrik Berglund up-front, Rasmus Ristolainen and Rasmus Dahlin on the back end and Carter Hutton in goal, all of whom combine for $25,340 million of cap dollars. Reinhart, Tage Thompson and Casey Mittelstadt will all be restricted free agents that season and could represent a big chunk of change for the Sabres. Dahlin will be coming off of his entry-level deal the following year and will probably command a pretty big hit.
When all things are considered, a bridge deal of two years for Reinhart is appropriate and if you thought the low range of the deal was $5 million then Botterill got himself a helluva bargain, especially when you look at the deals handed out this summer. But when looking at this earlier in the summer free from the static of those contracts, based upon Reinhart's young career in Buffalo,
neither side should be unhappy with this short-term deal.
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