The Minnesota Wild are about to face one of their most familiar tormentors. Jason Robertson enters the playoff series for the Dallas Stars as a scorer who has already burned Minnesota before, and now his future in Dallas sits under a brighter spotlight than ever.
Robertson had two goals and seven points in the last playoff series against Minnesota the following spring after his breakout 2022-23 season, when he became an All-Star and finished with 46 goals and 109 points. He was also a top competitor for Kirill Kaprizov for the Calder Trophy during the 2020-21 season, when he became a full-time NHL player and scored 17 goals with 45 points in 51 games. That production helped make him one of the league’s most efficient young scorers, and it is a big reason the Wild will spend this series worrying about him first.
The numbers now are still strong, if not quite at that peak. Robertson had 41 goals and 91 points in 78 games entering Thursday night’s game against the Wild, and he has tallied 80 points in each of the past two seasons. For Dallas, that is the sort of reliability teams usually pay to keep. But the Stars already made a major commitment last season when they acquired Mikko Rantanen from the Carolina Hurricanes in a trade and then signed him to an eight-year, $96 million contract.
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That deal matters because Robertson will become a restricted free agent at the end of this season. The Athletic’s Shayna Goldman projected his next contract at $11.9 million per season and his market value at $15.7 million over the next eight seasons, while Kaprizov’s new deal carries a $17 million annual average value that begins next year. Those figures frame what Dallas may be facing if Robertson keeps producing at his current level.
There is also a separate layer to this series for Robertson, one tied to Bill Guerin. Guerin did not add him to the United States national team for the Olympics and last year’s 4 Nations Tournament, even as the United States went on to win its first Olympic gold medal since 1980 under Guerin’s approach. That omission does not change the matchup on the ice, but it adds a personal edge to a series already loaded with it.
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The cleanest read is that Robertson is too important to the Stars to ignore and too expensive to treat as routine. If Minnesota knocks Dallas out in the first round, the conversation around his future in Dallas is likely to turn quickly from abstract to urgent.
