Jason Robertson, the Dallas Stars, and the Pursuit of Happiness in NHL Contract Negotiations
Sometimes there is no happy medium
Hello from Frisco, where the Stars are well underway in the first day of development camp. We’ll have more on today’s camp later, but with qualifying offers due to restricted free agents today, I wanted to share a couple more thoughts on the apparent impasse between the Stars and Jason Robertson.
You can listen to the start of 32 Thoughts today, where Elliotte Friedman says that the Stars and Robertson continue to be roughly $1.5-2 million apart in contract talks—a divide that doesn’t sound likely to shrink any time soon.
(Start at the 4:22 mark to hear the Robertson bits.)
Now of course, we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. But I do think there are two pretty crystallized perspectives here on both sides, with Robertson’s camp having set his minimum value at $14 million, and the Stars pretty clearly being unwilling (and practically unable) to go above the $12-12.5 million number we’ve been writing about here for months.
From the team side, the logic seems pretty clear to me. If I were to take a guess, I might summarize the Stars’ reasoning like something along these lines:
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