What will Andrew Mangiapane’s next contract look like?

On July 13, Calgary Flames forward Andrew Mangiapane will become a restricted free agent. He’s one of four big pieces of impending off-season business for general manager Brad Treliving.

Based on how his career has gone thus far, what kind of deal should we expect to see for Mangiapane?

Mangiapane is 25 years old. He’s currently in the middle of his sixth pro season, and he’s progressed rather quickly from promising prospect to really good NHL player.

Here’s Mangiapane’s general career trajectory:

As you can see, he was a good AHL player (2016-17), a tweener (2017-18), a good NHL fourth liner (2018-19), a good NHL middle-sixer (2019-20, 2020-21) and most recently a bonafide NHL top-sixer (2021-22).

This season is the second year of Mangiapane’s third NHL contract. After his entry-level deal (2016-19; $800,000 AAV), he signed a one-year deal (2019-20; $715,000 AAV) and followed that with a raise in his current deal (2020-22; $2.425 million AAV). He’s been an incredible value proposition for the Flames for basically his entire NHL run to this point.

Mangiapane turns 26 in April, so his upcoming contract will eat up the final season of his controllable years and, if it gets past one season, will begin buying up free agency years.

So far this season, Mangiapane has 17 points in 20 games. Let’s assume his production dips 20% over the remaining 62 games. If that holds, he’ll have 136 career points in 260 career games when the season ends, for a career average of 0.524 points per game.

Here’s a quick rundown of somewhat similar players who signed at ages 25, 26 or 27.

Like old Barrie Colts teammate Rasmus Andersson, Mangiapane is a bit of a unicorn. He progressed really quickly as a pro, but he didn’t become an NHL regular until his fourth pro season so precise comparable players are tough to find. His ceiling on the Flames is probably as a really good second line player, but his constant progression makes him a tough player to get a handle on.

The Reinhart, Buchnevich and Bjorkstrand deals put a bit of a cap on Mangiapane on a longer-term deal – Bertuzzi is an outlier, he’s arguably underpaid compared to similar players. So on a longer deal of three to five years, Mangiapane probably gets around $5.4 million (or slightly less). On a shorter deal, Burakovsky’s deal sets the negotiation floor: he probably gets around $5 million

Anyway, the numbers from comparable players strongly suggest that Mangiapane should get between $5 and $5.4 million depending on the length of his deal. Let’s meet in the middle and ballpark it as around four years and $5.3 million. If he out-performs our “80% of current production” projection for the remainder of the season, that number probably nudges up a little bit.

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