Shane Pinto breaks silence on gambling suspension: ‘It broke my heart’

A Friday practice in the middle of January is usually a mundane and bleak exercise, especially for a club mired in a five-game losing streak.

But for Shane Pinto, Friday’s session had a hint of magic and excitement. Nine days before he is eligible to return from one of the longest suspensions in NHL history, the young centre was finally permitted to return to the ice with his teammates in Ottawa.

“I don’t want to get too emotional, but it’s awesome,” Pinto told a handful of reporters in Ottawa on Friday. ” It’s been a long road for me.”

That road has come with unexpected twists and turns. It started as a contractual stalemate between the restricted free agent and the hockey team. But at the end of October, the NHL revealed that the main reason Pinto wasn’t playing for the Senators at the start of the regular season was that he was the subject of an intense investigation into gambling-related activities. On October 26, the league announced Pinto had been slapped with a 41-game suspension for “activities related to sports wagering.”

In his first public statement since the news broke, Pinto stated on Friday that he was devastated to be on the receiving end of a suspension that lasts exactly half of the regular season. He said he was “definitely caught off guard” when the NHL handed him the suspension at the end of October.

“It broke my heart, honestly. I care about this game so much,” Pinto said. “I put so much time and effort into it. To get it taken away from you for that long, it’s tough to hear. You’re kind of in shock at first.”

Pinto was reflective as he handled the question about the biggest lesson he learned throughout this process.

“Life can change in an instant,” Pinto said. “I learned that pretty quick.”

The NHL press release in October was only 55 words in length and carried no specifics about the infraction. On Friday, Pinto declined to shed any additional light on what he did that warranted the suspension in the first place. But just as he expressed in a written statement about the suspension in October when he took “full responsibility” for his actions, Pinto was equally accountable on Friday when speaking to reporters.

“I got to be more cautious, more mature in what I’m doing. I got to realize what position I’m in,” Pinto said. “There is always going to be a microscope on professional athletes. I took that for granted and I got to be better about it.”

When asked if the proliferation of gambling-related advertisements in hockey, from commercials, to rink board advertisements — even the Senators have a betting sponsor on their helmet — was a reason for his misstep, Pinto declined to go down that road.

“You see it on the commercials now, but that’s not (an) excuse,” Pinto said.

Given the ambiguity around his suspension — with so few details shared — Pinto says several NHL players reached out to him for clarification on the rules so they wouldn’t…