Zac Rinaldo earns a new contract after professional tryout offer.

A controversial forward has earned himself a new deal.

Professional tryout offers are never given out to players who realistically have no chance of cracking a National Hockey League roster, but in spite of that more often than not players who come in on a PTO are released from their tryouts prior to the end of NHL training camps. Everyone once in a while though a player does impress enough during training camp and the preseason to earn himself a new NHL contract, and that appears to have been exactly the case for much maligned forward Zac Rinaldo.

Rinaldo of course had agreed to sign a PTO with the Calgary Flames earlier this summer and it sounds like the Flames liked what they saw enough to offer him a new contract. According to a report from Stephen Whyno of the Associated Press, the Flames and Rinaldo have comes to terms on a new contract that will see the NHL veteran earn the league minimum during the 2019 - 2020 NHL regular season. That is of course assuming that Rinaldo will be playing at the NHL level, as one interesting detail about this new contract is that it is a two-way deal.

This would indicate to me that the Flames see Rinaldo as more of a serviceable depth option at this stage of his career than as an NHL regular, and there are some who believe that he may not see any time at all at the NHL level barring any injuries to the Flames roster. It is unclear at this time what Rinaldo will earn at the AHL level this upcoming season as those details have not been made public at the time of this writing. 

In Rinaldo the Flames are getting a talented winger that is not afraid to play right on the edge of the game, but it is that edge that has made Rinaldo such a lightning rod for controversy throughout his career. The 29 year old winger has faced numerous lengthy suspensions at both the NHL and AHL levels and has left plenty of injured players in his wake during those incidents. In his most recent season he appeared in 23 games for the Nashville Predators, scoring once and adding 2 assists for a total of 3 points, finishing the season with a plus minus rating of +1.