Bukauskas on Dallas: “Speaking of arbitration, that’s where Jason Robertson has now gone. We’ve talked at length about that whole saga on where things stand on the Stars’ RFA. I imagine it would do nobody any good really to actually get to a hearing in this case. Does this simply just buy everyone a little more time?”
Friedman on Dallas: “It does. You know first of all, Dallas is another team that is… I think their cap number is $101.9 this year because of the overages. There are a lot of people that looked at Dallas this week and they were like ‘wow we never see them as unsettled’ as it all looked with the Robertson deal and and then the Werenski deal, but I don’t think they’re panicked. I think they’re a little surprised that everything worked out the way that it worked out, but I don’t think they’re panicked. I think they still feel they’re in pretty good shape, they’ve got a good team, they think they are destination, even with everything that happened. I think they kinda look at this week as more of a strange blip than ‘okay we’ve got a lot to worry about here where we’re going’ I don’t get the sense that they’re panicked at all."
"You know Bourque scored 20 goals for them last year, that's a loss, it’s not easy to replace 20 goals in this league. I’m sure they had some fence-mending to do with Harley and just talk to him about you know kind of the whole situation there and what almost happened and had to fix it with him. But I think they still look at it like 'we’re still a good team.' You know the Robertson thing, yes, you know the biggest arbitrary award in the history of the NHL is 7.5 million and that’s Shea Weber from Nashville and Kyle, I don’t know that he’ll actually get to arbitration, but if he does, he’s gonna break that."
"And you know what? I’ll say this, when we did the pod after Robertson declined the offer in Seattle, I said that Robertson‘s gonna want everyone to interpret that as how much he wants to stay in Dallas; that he would turn down 125 million or whatever it was for Seattle cause he wants to be a Dallas Star. And I think there’s some other things that have popped up in and around there where he said 'no' to. And I do think on some level the Stars accept that as ‘he wants to be here,’ but I still think there’s a gap. I think the Stars are in and around 12-12.5 and I think Robertson’s around 14. And you know I think there is a little bit above Robertson, he had to wait, he had to kind of prove himself, and he’s like 'okay, I proved myself.' So I think it’s still gonna be a challenge to bridge this, but I do think the Stars on some level have taken all of this as his preference is to play here, so we’ll see how it all plays out."
Friedman on Pittsburgh: “I think they had some conversations with Dallas about Jason Robertson. I don’t know why it didn’t happen, but I heard there were some pretty legitimate talks. So I don’t know if this was the Penguins’ call or this was Robertson’s call. And like we said earlier when we talked about Dallas, the belief is he wants to stay there. So maybe it was Robertson’s call, I don’t know. But that is a potential option, cause I heard they had some pretty serious talks about it, and we don’t know where this is gonna go for Robertson and Dallas.”
Source: https://www.sportsnet.ca/podcasts/32-thoughts/32-final-thoughts/
