Matthews is a great player, no doubt about it. That said, the Calder is irrelevant, as is the All Rookie team.
Re. the bolded - I'm pretty sure there's no standard that says how much the best goal scorer in the league should be paid. To justify being the highest paid player, I think you should have a claim to being the best player period, not just best at one aspect of the game.
See the pic below, note the PTS/60 column. I'd say that PTS counts for a lot more than goals, and this seems to indicate that Matthews had one year where he won the hardware that really counts where he was the best player in the league but that was a bit of an outlier.
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I just had a peek at the Ted Lindsay award voting, if I'm not mistaken that's what the Pearson is now called. I assume that's more meaningful than the Hart voting as it's done by the players who presumably are better judges than the press (though I suspect there's probably not a lot of difference in the voting for those two awards). Here's where Matthews has finished over the last 5 years.
2019 - no votes
2020 - 10th
2021 - 2nd
2022 - 1st
2023 - 16th
If we accept that the players votes are meaningful, this indicates that he had not one, but two years where he played at an elite level that justifies paying him top dollar. Still, that's just two years out of the last five and last year was a big step in the wrong direction.
We're kind of damned if we do and damned if we don't so we pay the man and hope for the best. Maybe he'll turn out to be worth it and maybe we won't. I do think it's fair to say that in order for this contract not to be an overpayment his overall performance needs to better than it was over the last 5 years.
Edit - I just looked up Hart voting and I must admit I was a bit surprised to see that the results were exactly the same as the Lindsay voting. I expected similar results, not exact but whatever, these were the results.
2019 - no votes
2020 - 10th
2021 - 2nd
2022 - 1st
2023 - 16th
