Cole Perfetti has experienced miraculous playoff highs and ankle-twisting lows since his last contract negotiation.The goal he scored in Game 7 against St. Louis set a new record as the latest Game 7 tying goal in NHL history. Then Nikolaj Ehlers’ departure opened up a job on the Jets’ top power play, allowing Perfetti to feast on a unit that led the NHL in efficiency one year ago. If anyone was going to have a breakout season, it was him, fresh off 50 points and starting the season with newfound playoff confidence.Then a high ankle sprain took him out of the lineup. He scored just five points in his first 24 games to start the season and didn’t look like the same clever, incisive player that had produced in a secondary scoring role the previous year. As his ankle healed and his confidence in it grew, Perfetti’s scoring returned: he produced at a 50 points per 82 games rate from Jan. 1 through the end of the season. Add it all up, though, with the games missed due to injury, and Perfetti scored just 32 points in 68 games.Now the two-year, $3.25 million AAV bridge deal Perfetti signed in 2024 has come to an end — not with a massive breakout season but with a late return to form. He’s 24 years old, continues to show poise with the puck, good hands, and great vision, but his poor counting stats from last season will hurt him.Perfetti has more leverage this summer than he did two years ago. He’s a restricted free agent with arbitration rights and his first crack at UFA status could come as soon as 2027. If he wanted to play hardball, he’d simply file for arbitration and then wait for the hearing. It would guarantee him a one-year contract, putting the Jets under pressure next summer, with him just one year away from UFA status. This is similar to the strategies employed by former Jets like Andrew Copp and Jacob Trouba, which each resulted in trades.I don’t think it’s going to come to that. I project that the Jets will get Perfetti signed to a long-term contract, and it might age as a bargain, given Perfetti’s injury-impacted year and the series of cap increases projected in the years to come. But what will it cost the Jets?Today, we look at Perfetti’s contract through four different lenses, starting with a Jets comparable, adding a list of the NHL’s most recent RFAs, and then looking at two analytical models to project his most likely contract.Gabriel Vilardi: An in-house comparable?Two factors stopped the Jets from signing Perfetti to a long-term deal back in 2024. The first was that Perfetti’s $3.25 million AAV bridge deal kept his cap hit low, giving Winnipeg an opportunity to add contracts at the 2025 trade deadline. They took a serious run at Brock Nelson that would not have been possible had Perfetti been signed to a larger cap hit on a long term deal; the strategy is sound, even if the result was a failure.The second reason was that Winnipeg was not yet sold on Perfetti’s ceiling. He’d scored 75 points in 140 games at the time — similar to the 78 points in 152 games Gabriel Vilardi had scored prior to his his $3.4 million AAV bridge deal the previous summer — but Perfetti shared an injury history with Vilardi, too. Neither player had played a complete 82-game season prior to signing their bridge deals. In both cases, Winnipeg chose to wait and see.In Vilardi’s case, it cost them but worked out well, creating a $7.5 million AAV contract the Jets are happy to pay. He followed up his 2023 bridge deal with poor health and good results, playing with Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele on the first line and the top power play unit. He scored 97 points in 118 games in that role, then cashed in on the six year, $7.5 million AAV contract that started in 2025-26.