“Bonus points” are points. They still count. Teams still win. Again you have no proof that these situations have any bearing on contracts. Bunting outscored McDavid 5v5 in his contract year. That didn’t get him 12 million. Drai is a PP merchant. He got the highest aav ever. Ovy feasts on the PP. Colorado players still get paid despite their extra pp advantage. You can argue that he didn’t get used properly. Others can argue his coach didn’t trust him to play with the empty net or more than. 16 minutes a night. It doesn’t matter. It’s your opinion. You can make a case that he had a more impressive ELC sure. You cannot and have not shown any correlation to the numbers you presented leading to an 18% increase in cap. There is no historical precedent You cannot show that players who are not on pp 1 or don’t get team pp get higher contracts. There is no correlation between team PP and contract bumps. You honestly think that an arbitrator says. Welll you produced like a 5 million dollar player but your coach was mean to you and the refs didn’t call penalties for you so here is an extra 18% ??? Really? marners failure to be good enough to be the trigger man, or his coach to trust him to play more or be on the ice for empty net goals or draw enough powerplays.
Those points are points, but they don't represent anything about the player. That's the... point. Points aren't the perfect representations of player quality and impact that you want them to be. Some of those points represent something about the team, which is not what teams are paying for. The team didn't have more special teams time because of Rantanen, and having more special teams time didn't even benefit them. Because Rantanen was so much less efficient, Colorado scored less PP goals than Toronto despite being gifted the most PPs in the league, and because PPs and penalties tend to correlate, Colorado was -8 from special teams during that time. Leafs were +26. Efficiency is what wins you games. That's why PPs are ranked by percentage, not total PP goals. You can't rely on always having the same amount of special teams time. And Marner was the one with the better net penalty differential, for the record.
Get out of here with the "not good enough" nonsense. "Good enough to be the trigger man"? Being the trigger man isn't harder. If anything, its easier. You just have to stand there and shoot, not break down penalty kills. Both were among the PP ice time leaders on their team, and Marner did more to earn more minutes than Rantanen did. Marner didn't play 16 minutes a game. He played almost 18. Both were among the TOI leaders on their teams. Both were trusted to be on the ice in empty net situations. Colorado just had more of those chances. Both were trusted to be on the ice in 5v3 situations. Colorado just had more of those chances. Both were trusted to be main guys on their PPs. Colorado just had more of those chances.
Bunting didn't outscore McDavid in his contract year, but he (just like Hyman) did get less than his straight points/goals/ppg/gpg would suggest, because surprise: context is considered! Draisaitl got a high AAV because the cap is skyrocketing. It is not the highest cap hit percentage at all, but if we just went by your stats, he should be. Mackinnon didn't get full value for his straight production. Neither did Rantanen. You're literally countering your own argument. Also, nobody is saying that PP production is ignored. It's just contextualized. Also, you're wrong. Contracts
do correlate better when PP time information is factored in. There is way, way more evidence that something like this would be and was considered, than there is for your claim that all critical information is ignored and contract negotiations just entail spending months looking at a couple specific stats. You have provided nothing - only things that contradict your own argument - when quite frankly, you are the one with the burden of proof to support that the these contracts, actually signed by an actual GM that knows way more about contract negotiations and how they work than you, were wrong and were a result of GM incompetence instead of the very obvious gap that exists between them.
You seem to have even accepted that Rantanen wasn't better or even equal, and your argument now seems to be that GMs and agents are stupid and ignore critical information, because you said so against all evidence, and our GM was bad for not drawing a line in the sand to be stupid too, at the expense of our team. Do
you honestly think that a GM is going to say:
Well, I know we screwed you out of money on your ELC in a pretty unprecedented way, and I know that our coach was then abusive to you, and I know that you're getting offer sheets, and I know that you were one of the best young ES and PP producers in NHL history despite us making some pretty unprecedented decisions to neuter your production potential as much as possible, and I know that everything suggests you're worth 11m, but because you happened to come up in one of the lowest PPO eras ever, on a team that doesn't play a lot of special teams, under a coach that likes split units, we're going to ignore how good you actually are and draw a line in the sand refusing to pay you what you're actually worth and what even other players got for that level of
raw production, because we're only going to look at very specific stats for one specific player that hasn't even signed yet, and punish you for any disadvantages we irrationally gave you, and for helping the team on the PK instead of racking up more free points. Oh, also you're a playmaker, so screw you. Come on man. Really?