It appears there’s some legitimate smoke to the fire that erupted last week when Daily Faceoff’s Jeff Marek opined the Stars could move winger Jason Robertson to ease their incredibly restrictive salary cap space this summer. Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet said on 590 The FAN yesterday that Robertson’s name has indeed been floated in trade talks around the league, although “it’s not a guarantee that [he] goes.”
Robertson, 26 next month, has had a bit of a winding road since bursting onto the scene at the beginning of the decade. The 2017 second-rounder’s rookie season was the shortened 2021 campaign, scoring 45 points in 51 games to finish second on Dallas in scoring and place second in Calder Trophy voting behind Wild star Kirill Kaprizov. After eclipsing the point-per-game mark the following season, the two sides agreed on a four-year, $31MM deal after a lengthy run on the RFA market for Robertson.
It immediately looked like one of the best contracts in the league. Robertson erupted for a career-high 46 goals, 109 points, and a +37 rating while playing in all 82 games in the 2022-23 campaign, placing him fourth in MVP voting and tying for sixth in the NHL in scoring. Since then, Robertson has remained a veritable first-line piece but has seen his point production regress heavily, making him more of an ideal No. 2/3 forward instead of a team’s top scorer. He’s continued that ironman streak from the 2022-23 season but has just 80 points in each of the last two years, a 26% decrease in points per game from the heights of his breakout. His average ice time also dipped below 18 minutes per game in 2024-25 for the first time since his rookie season, and he was limited to six points in 11 postseason games after returning from a knee injury sustained in the final game of the regular season.
Aside from Dallas’ current unenviable cap situation, having just under $5MM in space with seven roster spots to fill, per PuckPedia, there are some peculiarities with Robertson’s contract that make him more of an understandable trade chip than at first glance. He’s still under team control as an RFA with arbitration rights when his extension expires next summer, and because his contract was somewhat significantly backloaded, he’s due a $9.3MM qualifying offer that’s much higher than his current $7.75MM cap hit. While Robertson’s upside remains tantalizing, is that QO number one the cap-crunched Stars are willing to even pay for one year, considering his more pedestrian offensive output over the past two seasons?
There are less efficient deals the Stars will presumably try to jettison first before becoming seriously engaged in Robertson talks. 2024 UFA defense pickups Mathew Dumba and Ilya Lyubushkin both flamed out and make $3.75MM and $3.25MM against the cap next season, respectively. They’d need to replace them with cheaper UFAs this summer, but packaging some futures to get rid of those contracts would at least open up the cap space to potentially retain two of their three main pending UFAs – forwards Jamie Benn, Matt Duchene, and Mikael Granlund. At present, they don’t stand much of a chance of even signing one while being able to fill out the rest of the roster.
If Dallas does structure a Robertson trade, they’ll presumably do so around a cost-effective player who can step into his top-six role directly – potentially a winger still on his entry-level deal – so they can use most of his cap hit to instead commit to extensions for the aforementioned UFAs and potentially pursue a depth defense upgrade.