Has Aho put up 50 goals or 100+ points?
True, contracts are based on raw numbers so because of that, Rantanen will get a bigger contract. On top of that, he'll be signing it 1-2 years after Aho did in a rising cap environment. Also, as bleed said, he's more of a goal scorer and has bigger size.
It won't matter for the contract, but looking at Aho vs. Rantanen, a few factors come into play:
1) Aho has never played winger with talent like McKinnon (2700 min. all situations last 2 years) and Makar (2100 minutes all situations last 2 years).
2) Canes system also stresses more defense first than Colorado, who scored about 40 more goals than Carolina over the past 2 seasons.
3) Aho played 2255 EVTOI and 465 PP TOI the past 2 seasons (and 272 SHTOI) compared to 2942 EVTOI and 707 PPTOI for Rantanen., who doesn't PK.
- Canes don't get as many calls as Colorado so less PP time as a whole.
- Canes have a much more even distribution of TOI due to depth.
- Rantanen doesn't PK so gets more ES/PP TOI. That's a lot of extra offensive minutes for Rantanen.
4) Aho plays C with more defensive responsibilities than Rantanen who plays W and he kills penalties.
Even with that, Rantanen didn't really score at a much higher rate than Aho over the past 2 seasons:
Even Strength: 2.70 Point /60 for Rantanen vs. 2.74 for Aho
PP: 6.51 vs. 6.03 Points / 60
Rantanen just got a lot more time ES and on the PP than Aho did. Is he a better scorer than Aho? Yes. Would he put up the same numbers in Carolina used the same way as Aho with similar line mates? Extremely unlikely.
As I said though, for a contract, it won't matter, but when you look at all the factors and underlying numbers, I don't think the two are as far off as raw numbers would lead one to believe.