Monday Rundown: A Very Cool Announcement, Jason Robertson Arbitration Endgames, What the Werenski Trade Attempt Proved, and Restaurant Recs

It's July 13, and the hockey isn't stopping

“I am a very good hockey player.”

Welcome to the Monday Rundown, where we cover a few different topics after beginning with a bit o’ nonsense. Today’s nonsense is food.

While I was coming back from the airport yesterday on the Orange¹ Line, I got to talking with a man who was in town for the World Cup. He asked me about restaurant recommendations for Irving on a Sunday night as well as Dallas in general, and that involved a lot of double-checking hours and menus as well, as well as convoluted explanations of Texas barbecue fare.

Thankfully, his English was much better than my Spanish, so I’m hopeful that he wound up getting a good bite to eat, but it did drive home a point for me: despite being back in this city for the last seven years, I still don’t know nearly enough of the best places to eat in D/FW.

So, I put it to you: what is the one spot you would tell any out-of-towner to eat at? Do you, like me, find yourself thinking about the polenta at Corrientes 348 way too often, or do you resort to red meat at Terry Black’s or Del Frisco’s Double Eagle? Lucia? Mamani? We’re spoiled for choice in this town, sometimes.

Thankfully, D Magazine has their typically indispensable list of such places, but I want to hear from y’all: What restaurant is solidly above and beyond all others in the area, in your expert opinion?

Now that we’re all hungry, let’s do that hockey.

Jason Robertson’s arbitration hearing set for July 25

By now, you know that Robertson’s hearing has been set for the 25th of July. The Stars have up until that hearing begins to reach a settlement with Robertson (or to trade him, if they desire).

If no settlement is reached by the time the hearing begins, then the hearing will proceed to completion, and the arbitrator will e-mail their decision within 48 hours of the end of the hearing. No settlement can be reached once the hearing starts.

Right now, I have a hard time seeing either party be especially motivated to settle, which is pretty rare for salary arbitration. But given that comparisons are limited to Robertson’s fellow RFAs (meaning no-go on players like Mikko Rantanen and Kirill Kaprizov, who signed deals as pending UFAs), I think the Stars can pretty reasonably anticipate that Robertson’s one-year number resulting from arbitration would come in at or even below the $12 million they’ve reportedly been targeting in negotiations.

Remember, only certain evidence is allowed to be used in arguing your arbitration case: Robertson’s reliability is a point in his favor, and even more so will be his elite scoring numbers. He really is one of the elite scoring wingers in the NHL, and he’s been asking for compensation that reflects that fact in negotiations (or reportedly asking, we should say).

On the other side of things, Robertson’s lack of of having worn a letter as an alternate captain will surely be mentioned by the team’s side, as well as the fact that he plays winger rather than center (like, for example, someone like Leo Carlsson does). His (smaller than you think) playoff scoring dip compared to his regular season production also would seem pertinent to a team looking to build a case for lower compensation.

PuckPedia has a handy comparison chart, if you haven’t seen it. If you’re Robertson and his agent, I suppose you’ll be hoping to invoke comparisons like Elias Pettersson, who signed for over 13% of the salary cap when he was a 26-year-old RFA (though again, Pettersson plays primarily center and takes tons of faceoffs). That 13% number equates to $13.5 million now. Matthew Tkachuk is perhaps a better comparison, though he signed at a younger age and after scoring more than Robertson, if you can believe it (before injuries slowed him way down the last two years). Tkachuk got $9.5 million (just over Robertson’s qualifying of $9.3 million), but that was 11.5% of the cap at the time, which equates to just about $12 million today.

Anything is possible, but I really do think somewhere between $11-12 million is the likely outcome, if both sides go through arbitration. An arbitrator handing down a one-year deal over $12 million would make Robertson one of the seven highest-paid players in the entire league. This would be surprising to me, and I think I have pretty good reason for saying so. Here are the ten highest cap hits resulting from a contract a player signed as an RFA:

Per PuckPedia

You will notice that nine of those ten contracts come in at $11.6 million or under. In other words, Robertson’s camp needs to argue convincingly that Leo Carlsson’s deal—as a far younger player playing a different forward position. Remember, arbitration hearings are very different things from negotiations. Whether Robertson actually will be worth $14 million is an entirely different discussion from whether he can justify it in the strict confines of an arbitration hearing.

Let’s narrow it down one last time to RFA contracts only for wingers, as I would guess the Stars would be doing when speaking their piece:

Winger RFA contracts, per PuckPedia

I think you can pretty easily argue that Robertson is a better player than Pavel Dorofeyev, who just signed a long-term deal for $11 million. But whether you can argue that a one-year deal should come in at a far higher number than a seven-year deal is another matter entirely.

The more I look at things, the more convinced I am that Robertson’s camp has nothing to lose by swinging big in an arbitration hearing. If you get lucky, the arbitrator is convinced that the market has shifted significantly in the last few months, and Robertson gets a higher reward accordingly. Thus, I don’t see a ton of motivation for them to settle in advance.

And if you’re Dallas, there’s good reason to expect (as I tend to) that a one-year award comes in closer to the scale set by the majority of comparable salaries than by one or two outliers. As elite as Robertson has been, he’s got his work cut out for him to come out of arbitration with a number that truly makes life difficult for Dallas in the short term.

If he does get a number well above $12 million, then the Stars can still make another move or two if needed. They can also trade him if it truly wrecks their cap for now, but even that wouldn’t need to happen immediately, as teams can go over the cap a bit during the summer.

But the way Dallas have gone about their business since July 1 makes me suspect that they would prefer to fit Robertson into this year’s plan for now, then explore trades in the coming months (or long-term extensions, if that possibility even exists after the painful process of arbitration). Teams often get a bit more hungry at the trade deadline, as you might recall from March 2025.

Lessons learned from Werenski rumors

Elliotte Friedman reported last week that the Stars’ offer to Columbus for Zach Werenski was Thomas Harley and Mavrik Bourque. And if you’d told me that back in April, I would’ve initially thought it was perhaps too steep a price, even for one of the best defensemen in the league.

But given the way things played out with Bourque—whose camp appears to have known that he could command $5+ million after hitting 20 goals—I think the offer makes a lot more sense. With other teams seeing the Stars’ cap crunch coming, I have to think that no really premium offers for Bourque were ever on the table. Thus, including him in the Harley/Werenski swap not only would have preserved draft capital for Dallas, but it also would have made their offer far better than a team like Toronto’s. It also would have allowed them to avoid what ended up happening: losing Bourque for roughly the equivalent of what an impending offer sheet would have returned.

Friedman also reported on that same podcast that he believes Werenski was kind of thrown off by how things accelerated in so short a time, and that this led to some kind of misunderstanding or miscommunication between his camp and Columbus (and as a result, Dallas) about his willingness to go to the Stars.

As for the other almost-trade, I still don’t know that we’ll ever get the truth about why the Stars believed Robertson was willing to sign an extension with Seattle in the attempted trade before the draft, but that deal also would have been one where Dallas recouped serious value for a seriously great player—with Dallas essentially doing the reverse of the Werenski deal and trading an older, more proven Robertson for a younger Knies (after flipping one of Seattle’s picks to Toronto) and bringing in two more assets as well.

Imagine the alternate scenario where both of Jim Nill’s big swings worked out: Dallas moves Jason Robertson, Thomas Harley, and Mavrik Bourque, and gets a return of something like two first-rounders, Matthew Knies, and Zach Werenski. You can argue about the long-term pros and cons of such maneuvering, but it certainly looks more attractive for Dallas than what wound up happening instead.

For the time being, you can fault Jim Nill for how things have worked out—NHL GMs have to own both their successes and their failures—but I don’t think you can fault him for trying to make lemonade out of some very tricky lemons.

(The salary cap is the lemons, I guess, or maybe a lemon tree. Does that make Tyler Myers a…Myers lemon?)

Announcing a live meetup on Tuesday, August 11

If you haven’t heard yet, Gavin Spittle of 105.3 the Fan has organized a unique and really fun event: On Tuesday, August 11, we’re doing a live meet & greet, Q&A session, and podcast recording at Boomerjacks in Allen. (Technically Fairview, I guess, as the Boomerjacks address is 131 E Stacy Road Fairview, TX.)

The meetup starts at 6:00pm, with a podcast recording happening roughly around 7pm. Guests will include Gavin, Sean Shapiro, Lia Assimakopoulos, and (sorry) me. There will be merch giveaways (including a shirt designed specifically for the event), a hangout session before we record, and probably a lot of other cool stuff, if I can stay out of the way long enough to make it happen. Also, air conditioning and cold drinks. Also, I’d imagine you could even get on the podcast yourself if you yell obnoxious things at just the right time.

(I may even have one or two surprises at the event myself, but you’ll have to come out to find out what that/those are.)

Personally, I’ve always loved the idea of doing a mid-summer hockey meetup, and doing one with colleagues like Lia, Gavin, and Sean is as good as it gets. Gavin has worked hard to make this happen, so do come out and say hello if you’re looking to scratch that hockey itch next month.

You don’t need to buy a ticket or anything—we wanted to make this as welcoming an event as possible—so if you just wanna grab an iced tea from the bar or whatever and record your own MST3K-style commentary of the whole thing on your phone while glaring at us from the corner of the room, please be our guest.

In any case, I’m really looking forward to hanging out with some good folks, so make sure you’re one of those good folks! I hope to see you on August 11.

1. When DART is good, it’s great. Nobody is going to say it’s perfect, but I’ll take the miniscule cost and efficiency of a regularly running train to a Park and Ride location over $30-40 Uber prices from the airport every single time.