No, that's how you're interpreting it.
It is the only possible interpretation of what he said. He said "Ehlers and Boeser at 8ish each vs Marner at 13-14-15M? It's a change with the core and they're good players." He also said "Rantanen or Boeser+Ehlers would be interesting alternatives to Marner", and laid out the 2 for 1 comparison: "151 pts for 15-16M vs 90 pts for 12.5-13M?". When somebody called him out noting that "letting Marner walk for Ehlers and Boeser is a hilariously bad take.", he responded that "being opposed to that is actually a hilariously bad take". He said some of this directly to you, so I don't know why you're pretending otherwise right now.
Isn't this what they've been doing since 2019? It hasn't really worked, has it?
It's what every successful team does. We had a guy that was a lot better at it, and he found a bunch of cheap and effective depth pieces to navigate us through a drained prospect pool, multi-year flat cap, and a high-end draft pick dying, and it worked really well, but we unfortunately let him go because of stupid nonsense, and then hired somebody who is pretty bad at it. But the new guy is getting saved by the old guy's prospects right now, and pretty soon he'll have a huge influx of cap space to held cover for his incompetence.
Part of the reason there are no players to re-sign is that they haven't been able to keep any of their depth over the last 3-5 years; it's the near-constant rotation of middle and bottom 6 players, and the same goes for the defence
Who haven't we been able to re-sign? We haven't lost anybody to cap. We've had turnover in our depth for a lot of other reasons, but not for cap, outside of the normal trying to avoid signing bad contracts. Depth turnover is pretty normal, especially for good teams. We actually probably should have done more of it recently. Just in the past year, beyond the core 4, we re-signed 5 forwards, 3 defensemen, and 2 goalies currently on our roster. Marner won't get in the way of re-signing Knies.
It's not ridiculous to say that keeping this roster construction with a three headed cap hydra is a concession in itself because you just can't fill the rest of the team as best as you could, yet this NBA "stars over anything" mentality still persists; why? We've had no success with it.
You can fill the team just fine. It's not stars over everything. It's team over everything. Logic over emotion. Giving us the best chance moving forward over dwelling on the past. We haven't gotten the cup yet, but this model has been successful through the most difficult possible situations for this model, and abandoning it by getting rid of one of our best players - especially when we're about to get all the cap space we could ever ask for - is just going to make us worse. I'm not interested in getting worse. We've been doing enough of that already.
Colorado has changed, and they've actually won something...
Colorado changed a smaller piece for unrelated reasons, after winning with their stars, and they're worse off for it.
It's not cherry-picking when he makes as much as he does. He gets paid what he does to produce points, and he's a 90-point scorer, as you've pointed out.
It is, by definition, cherry picking. You're isolating a specific point type and specific time frame, and misrepresenting the impact of the individual. He gets paid for his overall impact like everybody else, and as I've pointed out, he's more than just a 90 point scorer. He's a 100+ point all-situations two-way force that is dominant offensively and defensively in every game state.
If he wants to be paid like Rantanen, then produce and have success like he has.
He'll be paid more than Rantanen because he's a better player than Rantanen. GMs understand that. Contracts aren't based on team success.
Well, kind of; by saying more than 90, you are inferring it's better than 90 when really he's only paced like that twice. 21-22 and this season. So, whether it's 90 or 96, it's more or less the same value. 90 is 90, and that's impressive, so it doesn't need to be glossed up.
He's paced more than 90 every season for the past 7 years:
2018-2019: 94
2019-2020: 93
2020-2021: 100
2021-2022: 111
2022-2023: 102
2023-2024: 101
2024-2025: 111
The individual seemed to take special care to be precise for the other players, and that's a pretty significant underrepresentation for Marner. Being accurate and consistent is not "glossing" anything up.