The good news for the Dallas Stars and Jason Robertson is that, by signing a one-year contract for $12 million, they avoided arbitration.

That's an unpleasant process that usually harms relationships, if not outright fractures them. To get ink on a contract extension is great news, and for Dallas, the $12-million salary is even better. But the term here creates a lot of uncertainty, such that it's hard to tell who wins or loses in the coming months.

Let's break down the pros and cons of this deal for both sides.

The most obvious benefit of this contract for the team is that they keep together their championship core at a time when they are extremely competitive for a Stanley Cup, even if they suffered a first-round exit to the Minnesota Wild this past campaign.

Robertson is, if not Dallas' best player, then certainly their best forward, and the fact that they took 'Mikko Rantanen money' to stay for one more year before becoming a UFA keeps everything nice and affordable, relatively.

Robertson is ninth league-wide in both points and goals over the past five seasons, and nearly everyone in front of him in either category has been in MVP conversations during that time.

Other aspects of his game maybe aren't everything you'd like your top forward to bring to the table, but the offensive impact is undeniable. If Dallas had been able to successfully trade him — and it's awfully lucky for them that he doesn't want to go get overpaid by a losing franchise like the Seattle Kraken — it would be impossible to replace him. If you want to compete for hardware, you need players of Robertson's caliber.

The good news is the Stars have superstars in Robertson and Rantanen, the latter being seventh in points and 13th in goals over the past five years.

This also puts them in a position where they can go back to Robertson starting in January and negotiate a new contract, secure in the knowledge that Tyler Seguin's gargantuan contract, carrying a $9.85-million cap hit, is coming off the books.

Maybe then Dallas can afford to step into the nine-figure-salary-cap era in a serious way and pay Robertson something more commensurate with what he's worth in a league with a rapidly growing salary cap.

Robertson's one-year term probably scares a good chunk of Stars fans.

It creates an immense amount of pressure on the team to be as competitive as everyone is expecting. Even then, what does that really get you at the end of the day?

If the Stars don't at least see the Western Conference final, the risk of not convincing Robertson he can win there long-term is all too real.

There isn't a realistic scenario in which Robertson is having a good season, and the Stars are struggling to keep up in the Central Division, or the West as a whole. If that were somehow the case, they could trade him to a desirable destination — or even as a rental to a more competitive team with salary retained, in exchange for a monster haul of futures and maybe a couple of younger roster players, just like the Rantanen trades that got him to Dallas in the first place. But again, not very likely.

So, if it gets to a point where the Stars are even barely hanging on to a playoff spot, they still can't trade him because to trade him would be to consciously take a step back when everyone else on the roster is still in a prime competitive age.

But again, you don't meaningfully compete for anything without a Robertson-level player on your roster, so barring some sort of three-way trade that returns you a star player from another team, a Robertson trade means you're getting worse.

But that's not even the worst-case scenario.

That scenario is that the Stars have a great regular season, something similar to 2025-26, and get nuked in the first round again because the Central is a slaughterhouse.

Then there's a very real risk Robertson doesn't feel like he can win there, and if that's the case, he could very well either walk for nothing or ask the Stars to give him even more money, which further limits their future competitive abilities.

Robertson certainly took less money than he's worth to stay in Dallas, but doing so means he remains on a competitive team. One that has put him in a position to succeed to the extent of being one of the top offensive producers in the league over five years.

That didn't always feel like it was in the cards, and not even that long ago, the U.S. Olympic team passed up on him for the 2026 Winter Games. Even the Stars were looking at what he brings to the table as a player, what he was asking for on his next contract, and considering trading him elsewhere. 

But now Robertson has the opportunity to shove that mistrust and willingness to openly do business with him as a trade chip right down their throats. At $12 million, a guy who's likely to score around 40 goals and 85 points is a steal.

However, if it all goes well, he can turn around and easily ask to become a top-three paid player in the NHL. And if the Stars won't give it to him, someone else almost certainly will when the salary cap is well over $110 million and trending upward very sharply.

It might not necessarily be a team that's as competitive as Dallas seems to be, but for an extra $5 million or so a year, that may be a little easier to overlook.

A lot of the future depends on him. As mentioned, if the Stars are good again — and it's hard to see an alternative outcome — he'll be a huge driving factor. He can basically write his own ticket.

But what if he has a cold shooting season akin to the 29-goal campaign of 2023-24? He still provided 80 points that year, but his forte and value are his ability to score goals. What if he deals with injuries for the first time in his career? Or the Stars get eliminated with him going goal-less in the first round of the playoffs? Then we're having a very different conversation about what his UFA contract looks like.

Opinions around the league seem a little dimmer on him than they really ought to be, and if he feeds into that with a weaker contract year when he's supposed to be ringing the bell, that's a problem.

You wonder what Dallas would have been willing to give him to buy three or four UFA seasons on top of the one-year deal he signed. Whatever it is, he's certainly hoping to blow past that number, whether it's with Dallas or elsewhere.

However, he wouldn't be the first guy to have a less-than-ideal year going into free agency and cost himself a bunch of money. With the cap rising as it is, we could be talking about several million dollars.

That scenario does not feel particularly likely. He is, again, one of the best players in the league and has been advertising it to everyone for half a decade. But it's in the range of possible outcomes, and it's a risk that comes with any one-year contract for relatively short money.

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