The Toronto Maple Leafs and Nick Robertson have avoided salary arbitration by agreeing to a one-year, $1.825 million contract, first reported by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and made official by the team.
We’ve re-signed forward Nicholas Robertson to a one-year contract extension pic.twitter.com/epA8AYS9EB
— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) August 2, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The two sides were set to attend an arbitration meeting on Saturday, with the Leafs setting their number at $1.2 million, while Robertson’s camp requested $2.25 million. It was the final salary arbitration decision to be conducted this summer, so there are no further arbitration hearings happening until next summer. As a result of the two sides reaching an agreement, the second buyout window won’t be open for the Leafs, though they were unlikely to use it to begin with.
This is the third consecutive season where the Maple Leafs have had a player elect to go to arbitration, eventually finding common ground with Ilya Samsonov in 2023 and Connor Dewar in 2024. Of the three players in this group, Samsonov was the only one who actually had to sit through the hearing, while the Leafs were able to get a deal done beforehand with Dewar and Robertson.
As a result of the signing, the Leafs now have around $1.1 million in cap space according to PuckPedia. They also have 15 forwards under contract on the active roster and that is bound to change since a team legally can’t have that many by the time the regular season commences. There were already rumours that the likes of David Kamop and Calle Jarnkrok are available for trade, and the Robertson signing could accelerate the timeline for their potential departures.
While he now has a contract extension done with the Leafs, things remain uncertain for Robertson’s long-term future in Toronto. He put in a trade request last summer that proved to be unsuccessful, before agreeing to a one-year extension on September 10th. While Robertson was able to move on from the trade request as he made the NHL roster out of camp, he was unable to gain a strong foothold in the lineup and barely played in the playoffs.
“Yeah, Nick’s a good player,” Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving said in June. “Again, we’re in June, the puzzle has to come into place. But I think Nick is a good player. He’s still a young player, he’s still an evolving player, but he’s got a skill set and he shoots it in the net. That’s a good skill set to have.”
Robertson appeared in 69 games last season, where he amassed 22 points (15 goals and seven assists) while adding two points (a goal and an assist) in three playoff games.