First Shift 🏒
We have seen Robertson do this before.
The lanky left winger has always been a streaky scorer, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he’s on a hot streak right now. Robertson has three goals and three assists in the past two games and has pushed his goal-scoring to six on the year after getting held without a marker in the previous nine games.
“I think any offensive guy will tell you that once you get one, they start to come in bunches,” Stars coach Glen Gulutzan said. “The one thing with Robo is he’s very resilient. He knows if he’s getting his looks that he’ll score.”
Robertson leads the Stars in shots on goal at 76 and is also first on the team in SAT (shot attempt differential), so he clearly is pushing the analytics to a good place. He said that helps keep his confidence high when the puck isn’t going in.
“If you’re getting the chances, you feel good,” he said. “It’s frustrating, sure, but you feel like it’s going to happen.”
Robertson’s goal Tuesday in Ottawa was a great shot on the power play that tied the game in the third period, so that was huge. Then, on Thursday, he was part of a beautiful play in transition where Rantanen got a puck to Thomas Harley on the wing and Harley found Robertson going to the net. The 26-year-old lifted in a fantastic backhand to make the score 4-0.
Not so ironically, he scored his second goal of the game a little over a minute later. This one was the kind Robertson has scored a lot in his career. He had the puck to the left of the goal, circled into the middle and just swept a seeing-eye shot through a bunch of bodies.
“Yeah, you drive the middle of the ice and those pucks...they just went in,” Robertson said with a laugh. “Hopefully, they’ll continue to go in.”
That is his history. Robertson last season was recovering from foot surgery and started out slow. But after Christmas, he ranked third in goal scoring with 28 in the final 49 games.
“Confidence is a funny thing,” Gulutzan said. “If you look at his analytics, they would suggest that he’s going to score. When you’ve been that good of a scorer for that long, it’s not a one off. It’s a credit to him, he never got too down on himself. He wanted to score, but he also internally believed he could score, so kudos to him.”
