Edited May 16 at 10:33 a.m.
Quoting: hawksfan1988
I understand what you're saying re: Bedard needs better talent around him.
However there's a better chance the Hawks trade their 2025 1st rounder for Marner if that trade was to happen. They aren't trading their 2nd OA pick this year. One could argue the 2nd rounder is a lot more valuable over Marner. Marner is going to cost the Hawks over 12,000,000 in cap space on a resign.
Well, as far as the compensation for skaters like Marner:
The hard salary cap makes it so that these elite performers are not paid what their contribution is - they all would get more in a free market. If you compare offensive rate metrics and aav, nearly all these guys outperform the average in terms of dollars for performance despite their higher pay.
But money aside, each team only has 4 top 6 winger slots. They’re guaranteed to be filled by somebody. The quality of the somebodies drives your teams competitive position.
If you can secure a top 10 winger in the nhl for 8 years, most other teams are jealous and at a disadvantage in that specific area. They’re still all paying 4 top 6 wingers, but most all of them are worse than the one you hypothetically have. There’s a small handful league wide that are better than Marner is projected to be the years 27-35. Perhaps 5 wingers will be better? Out of 32 x 4 wingers.
Marners expected performance and the stability provided to Bedard and the team in general is worth double the aav IMO. It’s something that’s so rarely for sale that it is near priceless. We’d all trade for McDavid, Pasta, Matt Tkachuk, Drai, Crosby, MacKinnon if they were available. We wouldn’t care about how much money they got.
There are arguments to make regarding the team composition and playstyle of each player, and in this case with Bedard and Matthew’s similarity, I think it’s positive - marner likes puck possession and rush offense, the two things Bedard likes, marner likes to pass more than shoot, Bedard likes to shoot more than pass, but the ability to acquire a top 10 winger (that doesn’t have some crazy drawback like major addiction problem or massive injury history) is so rare that things like the future AAV don’t matter, as long as it fits in the planned cost structure - in Chicago’s case, their 10 year plan is wide open and depends on future performance.
A team may wait 10-20 years for the opportunity to consider acquiring a player of this caliber. The only reason Toronto is ejecting him is because they have too many elite performers at the same age. That’s a problem Chicago will have if they focus their entire core future on a 2-3 year draft window, eventually having to be like Toronto and eject an elite player at a good age because there’s too much density of performance by birthdate.
A guy like marners aav looks gross year 1, but in a normal “cap goin up” environment, the tail of the term is discounted, which allows for healthy team building when staggered.