Robertson contract a gamble for player and team
One of the biggest questions looming over the NHL season was answered on Tuesday when the Dallas Stars announced a new one-year, $12 million contract for standout winger Jason Robertson.
The move ended a stalemate between the two sides after a failure to agree to a long-term contract and multiple attempts at sign-and-trades that did not come to fruition for Robertson, who finished the 2025-26 season with 45 goals and 96 points in 82 regular season games.
Now, Robertson is set to be an unrestricted free agent next July 1, but he is also eligible to sign an extension with the Stars beginning in January, a point when Dallas will have far more salary cap flexibility than they do right now.
On Wednesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed why the contract carries risk on both sides of the equation.
Tyler Yaremchuk: Let’s talk about the news from last night. Jason Robertson resigns with the Dallas Stars. It is a one year deal worth $12 million. A little bit of an eyebrow raiser from kind of every perspective for me. Because one, deal can’t come with any no-movement protection or no-trade protection because he’s still in his RFA years. So this trade is going to perfectly walk him to unrestricted free agency. This also means, like Dallas could trade him wherever they want to in the next few months. If they get to the deadline and they’re like, hey, we’re not going to be able to extend this guy, they can move on from him, which is kind of crazy considering he turned down that deal with Seattle that would have made him like over $100 million over the course of the deal. So pretty weird to see these two sides settle on a one-year contract.
Carter Hutton: Yeah. And the fact of, I guess you maybe lose leverage in a sense as a player is, you know, you’re able to get moved out and you end up somewhere maybe you don’t want to be, or someone’s willing to trade for you for that $12 million and give up a bundle, but in the other side of it is he doesn’t have to re-sign, right? It could be a sign-and-trade… but if he doesn’t want to, he’s got that potential to hold out, to get to where he wants to go and be that UFA. Kind of similar to what I saw with Mikko [Rantanen] when he was traded to the Carolina Hurricanes, and then he didn’t want that deal and they had to get rid of him very quickly. On the flip side, but for Jason Robertson, at the end of the day, now he’s going to be able to go wherever he wants as a UFA. It’s going to be unrestricted. He’s going to be able to get whatever he wants, but this is a high risk contract for me… Now you’re an injury away at 27, or something happening where you might leave a lot of money on the table.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…