As the college hockey season has narrowed its way down to the sixteen teams competing in the Frozen Four NCAA championship games, expect a lot of drafted prospects on teams that didn’t make it start signing their entry-level contracts. The Tampa Bay Lightning shored up the services of one of their 2021 draft picks, Cooper Flinton, with a two-year ELC the club announced on Monday.
Cooper, who is also referred to as Robert on some sites, is a 21-year-old forward who was taken in the seventh round of the 2021 season and has played at Dartmouth over the past three years. The 6’2″, 205 lbs. left-shot forward put up somewhat similar seasons in his sophomore and junior seasons as he scored 15 goals with 10 assists in 30 games in 2023-24 while following that up with 11 goals and 13 assists this past season. He’ll join the Syracuse Crunch on a try-out contract for the remainder of this year, and his new two-year deal will kick in next season.
As we mentioned last week, Flinton was among a group of players that still had another year before their draft rights expired so it’s a mild surprise that he chose to come out of school early. One benefit for him is that it will get his professional career started earlier, and possibly help him get to unrestricted free agency as a Group VI free agent faster than if he stayed in college for another season.
Flinton, who has not been ranked in any of our Top 25 Under 25’s to date, does have a long, uphill battle to face to get to the NHL. Flinton wasn’t ranked by Central Scouting in his draft year as he played a minimal number of games during the 2020-21 COVID year. After he was drafted, he spent a season with the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders where he put up 11 goals in 57 games. After that he went to Dartmouth and slowly developed into a scorer for the Big Green.
Following his draft selection, The Athletic’s Corey Pronman had this to say about Flinton:
“Flinton is a big forward with some skill and offensive hockey sense, but scouts have issues with his skating and don’t find him to be that physical.”
He doesn’t project as a big scoring threat in professional hockey, but he should be the type of player that does all of the little things right and grinds out shift after shift, helping his team control the puck and set up scoring chances.
As a college player we haven’t seen much of Flinton outside of some post-draft prospect camps, and he’s likely not to see much game action in Syracuse as the Crunch fight for a playoff spot. Still, it’s good to get him into the system and set expectations for next year when he has a shot to make Syracuse’s team and work his way up the forward ranks.
