The Carolina Hurricanes have signed forward Eric Robinson to a four-year, $6.8MM contract extension per a team release. The deal will carry an annual cap hit of $1.7MM, per Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman.
Robinson has found a healthy stride in the latter half of his pro career. He originally went undrafted, and didn’t earn NHL acclaim until signing an entry-level contract with the Columbus Blue Jackets at the end of the 2017-18 season. Robinson was coming off of four impressive seasons at Princeton University. His rookie season in the AHL in 2018-19 was marked with solid impacts and hard effort – ultimately earning Robinson 24 points in 45 AHL games and the first extended NHL stint of his career, where he went scoreless in 13 games.
But Robinson wasn’t deterred – and continued to provide a strong impact to the AHL lineup through the start of the 2019-20 season. After just 14 games, Columbus made the move to promote him to a menial fourth-line role. He began rotating in-and-out of the lineup, though never managed much in the way of scoresheet impact. Prior to this season, his career-years stood as a 27-point performance in 67 games of the 2021-22 season, and 24 points in 72 games of the 2022-23 campaign.
Columbus relinquished Robinson last season, shipping him off to the Buffalo Sabres for a menial return. But Robinson began to show flashes of impact in the Buffalo lineup – even through scoring just nine points in 40 games. His stat line wasn’t enough to convince Buffalo to re-sign him, but it did catch the eye of new Carolina Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky, who signed Robinson to a one-year, $950K contract last summer.
That proved to be one of the more lucrative deals of the NHL season. Robinson posted 14 goals and 32 points while appearing in all 82 games of Carolina’s season. He was a low-stakes, high-reward lineup addition for a Hurricanes team that routinely relies on impactful pieces down the lineup. With that performance, Robinson has now earned the first million-dollar deal of his eight-year NHL career – and solidified a contract through his age-34 season.