Nick Robertson has a new deal with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Elliotte Friedman reported this morning that Robertson and the Penguins reached a settlement worth two years at $3.25 million a year.
That's a real jump from the $1.825 million he was working with last season.
Robertson turns 24 and just wrapped a 78 game season with 16 goals, 16 assists and 32 points.
Nick Robertson and Pittsburgh have a settlement
2 x $3.25M for him.
He went minus-13 on the year, with two power play goals and a game-winning goal mixed in.
The last stretch wasn't pretty. Over his last 10 games he scored three goals but sat at minus-5.
Penguins bet on Robertson finding his scoring touch again
Five games before that, he had just one goal and was minus-3. The dip is real, and Pittsburgh is paying him like it isn't.
Kyle Dubas runs this front office, and Dan Muse is behind the bench for a Penguins team that finished 41-25-16 with 98 points.
Pittsburgh landed 10th overall and second in their division, hardly a rebuild year by the numbers.
But they've dropped three straight, including a 5-7 loss on the road against St. Louis to close things out.
A near-doubling of Robertson's cap number says the Penguins still believe in the player who once looked like a first-round scorer in Toronto.
Is it a bad bet? Not necessarily. But locking in term and dollars on a guy trending the wrong way over his last ten games is a gamble, not a lock.
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Pittsburgh's cap sheet just got a little tighter, and the pressure on Robertson to produce just got a lot bigger.
Did the Penguins overpay Nick Robertson with this new deal?
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