Can you remind me what those contracts were? Were any of them RFA wingers that signed for 6 years or less?
Sure. Konecny and Boeser are two. Kessel's another.
edit: But with that said, I think the scope of that question is kind of ridiculous. If Marner got a certain percentage of the cap and then a much less productive center got on the surface a much more lucrative deal should we shrug our shoulders and say that those things are just fundamental incomparable? Or a 6 year deal and an 8 year deal?
Broadly speaking, I agree with you -- using more comparables (provided they are gathered systematically) is going to lead to stronger analysis. But at the same time, using more comparables complicates the discussion we are having right now because expanding the set of comparables expands the differences between players too and we seem to disagree on how to weigh such differences. How important are goals vs assists? Primary points vs overall points? Center vs winger? Linemates? UFA vs RFA? UFA years bought out for an RFA. And then, how do you combine all those opposing components to generate a single number for a guy? I think you said it earlier: there's a lot of different ways to slice the data. I think Rantanen's contract is going to be an interesting comparable; you think he has the advantage of playing with McKinnon; well, I think Marner has the advantage of playing with Tavares over Aho and Aho's a center and scored more goals and it goes on and on and on ...
Looking at a system like evolving wild's and then trying to account for why one's personal projections might differ from that system seems to make sense. The evolving wild's model has done pretty well in the past, but it definitely could be wrong and in fact should be wrong if GMs, broadly speaking, are making different decisions about how to value RFAs like Marner.
I looked up the guys you mentioned:
Boeser: 5.76 predicted for a 3-year contract. He got 5.87.
Konecny: 5.9 predicted for 6 years. He got 5.5.
Marner: 8.8 predicted for 6 years. He got 10.8.
(Kessel was a while ago. I'm fine to include him, but I don't know how to find the data. We should probably include all the guys with a similar profile and then look at the average contract to see if Marner lies above or below the average.)
If there was a shift in how GMs were valuing players, one would expect a model like evolving wild's to be systematically low for the current crop of players, but it doesn't seem to be.
I agree that Point is an outlier on the low side (EW predicted 7.1 on a 3-year contract). Marner seems to be an outlier on the high side.
I understand why Dubas did what he did. We'll never know whether waiting Marner out would have been a good idea or a catastrophic one. It makes a fair amount of sense to hedge one's bets here and go the conservative route. I'd definitely prefer having Marner at 10.8 over trading him for a bunch of overpaid midrange guys and/or prospects who are unlikely ever to be half as good as he is. I don't think the Marner contract would bother me at all if it weren't for the fact that we currently have the best team in my lifetime by far and yet, thanks to Leaf luck, are saddled in a division with a historically great Tampa team that has a systematic advantage, a very fine Boston team, and have to deal with the ridiculous playoff format.