Robertson topped the 40-goal mark for the third time in his career, with 91 points (41 goals, 50 assists) in 78 games for the Stars, who host the Minnesota Wild on Thursday (9 p.m. ET; HULU, ESPN+) in a preview of their Western Conference First Round series, which was set on Tuesday. Home-ice advantage for that series is still up for grabs, with Dallas leading Minnesota by two points and already holding the first tiebreaker (regulation wins) 35-30. Each team has four games left.
Robertson leads the Stars and all United States-born players in points (two more than Kyle Connor of the Winnipeg Jets), and he’s second in goals among Americans to Cole Caufield (49 goals) of the Montreal Canadiens, who was also left off Team USA’s roster.
Asked about those perceptions and realities of his game, Robertson said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
It’s part of why he has always been so drawn to analytics, to the numbers that can increasingly quantify exactly what he does on the ice and what he doesn’t, the video that can show how a play went and how it was supposed to go.
“Perception is everything,” Robertson said. “Analytics when they all match up together, they don’t really lie and you can tell where your game’s been heading, what’s gone right. Results too. Those don’t lie. But perception is a lot and over my career, I think, people think that a lot. But it doesn’t really matter. I think the results and the analytics speak for themselves.”
Does that mean the conversation about him is shifting?
“I don’t know,” Robertson said. “I don’t know what people see. I see what I see and I see a player who’s moving their feet more, battling harder, and creating more opportunity, taking guys on, one on one, using my body, protecting the puck, breaking the puck out well, everything. So I see that. And the coaches see that.”
Robertson knows because he sees it. He has long loved watching his own film, diving deep into the shifts, amazed at the wealth of numbers and clips he can get his hands on since he joined the NHL. He was thrilled when he realized that there were iPads on the benches for real-time review, after they were introduced two seasons before he made his NHL debut in 2019-20, tickled at phone access to clips.
As he said, he looks at the numbers, the video “quite a bit. … Having that accessibility, it’s been huge. I mean, I love it.”
“You play so many games, so it’s hard to keep track of it,” he said. “But I watch all my shifts from last game. You can tell offensive zone possession time, xGA, xGF, all that type of stuff, controlled entries, everything. So you see how involved you are in the games.
“Some people are old school or traditional, and to each their own, but there’s nothing better than learning from your mistakes and everything and trying to improve.”
It is, as he put it, “an open book of knowledge.”
