It means that people take the raw points number and expect it to be a perfect representation of a player's offensive quality, impact, ability to generate offense, and overall performance, when it's not.
There are two things that determine raw points:
1. There are internal factors, which is what the player themselves are bringing to the equation to get the end results.
2. Then there are external factors. These are the situations that a player experiences that either benefit or hinder their raw production.
There are some external factors that we need to account for in any situation, like ice time, linemate quality, etc.
But then there are other external factors. Ones that over a significant sample size in the regular season, tend to even out, because you're facing a similar variety of different teams and goalies and performances and streaks and injuries as everybody else over a massive period of time where there are enough rare goal events to attribute cause. It makes point production more viable as a proxy for the offensive impact and performance an individual is bringing, as long as we account for the external factors that remain disparate like ice time, so we tend not to think about it when discussing production.
But in the playoffs, those external factors don't even out. Players are facing vastly different teams, with vastly different defenses, and vastly different goalies, having vastly difference performances and streaks, and experiencing vastly difference injuries, over a tiny sample of games within a couple week period. For some reason, we acknowledge that point production over small sample sizes in the regular season can't be used to completely alter the perception of players, but we take 4-7 game samples as the end-all, be-all in the playoffs and make wild declarations about players. I get that the playoff production is more emotionally meaningful to fans, and so we put so much more weight on it, but it being important to us doesn't change how production actually works. It's actually less representative than the regular season relative to sample size without adding context into the discussion that nobody seems to want to do.
So when you compare across teams and say our player got less playoff production than that player, it doesn't automatically mean that our player was performing worse.
It might be that our player was performing worse, but it also might be a big difference in external factors that aren't being accounted for.
If one player faces a bad defensive team that has their starter injured, and they put up big numbers against a goalie performing below league average, and then one player faces a top defensive team playing in front of a generational goalie having one of the best performances of all-time, and they put up smaller numbers, which player performed better?
Was the first player actually better at generating offense, or was the first player just in an easier situation to produce? If the production in that small 4-7 game sample relative to the other player is opposite of what a massive 200-game, more equal situation sample says, which should we trust to give a more accurate representation of the player?
All playoff games are equally important. Winning in one doesn't mean more than winning in another. Scoring in general tends to decrease as series extend, because refs get scared to make calls, players get injured, and players get increasingly cautious of making a mistake, which usually means lower event hockey and less critical mistakes. That's not unique to Marner.
The issue is that they do do all of these things that you say. They take accountability. They say they need to be better. They look absolutely devastated after losing.
But if you want to see the bad in people, or remember certain moments that you have construed a certain way, you'll always be able to.
Is that even true? According to who? Lots of players didn't win a playoff round through age 24. We also put way too much emphasis on round, with again, zero consideration of what we were facing and what we were experiencing. If you put massive emphasis on playoffs determining the quality of a team, then losing to a Cup finalist in 4 of the past 5 years should mean something.
It's worth exchanging a star for different allocation if that different allocation provides more overall impact, but that's not the realistic case here, especially for Matthews/Marner.
And we don't have any massive holes that we need to tear down our core to fix.
What massive holes do you think we need 11m to fix, and how would we use it to improve our team more than the lost impact of the player we lost?
