Your monologue about Marner was great. I only want to point out one thing: it's not about the money he'd make. It's about the length of the contract. People don't want those almost decade long contracts anymore. It'll tie them down too much. Then again, the management doesn't want to think about stuff until seven or eight years later, so they of course don't want to sign shorter contracts with their star players.
Well yes that was part of my thought process when I was writing it. Altho I would argue that the leafs don’t exactly see a long term deal as inherently beneficial to them. They have offered a bridge deal to mitch at 3 years, the probelm was that it was an 8 mil a year deal, which they did like. Bob McKenzie tweeted something along the lines of “the leafs offered him 11 mil for 7 years, but because the term is longer than matthews and the money is less, it wasn’t palatable to marner.” Meaning that it’s more about respect and being compared to Auston, and feel disrespected than it really is about either term or money.
I don’t know if I focused that much on the money in my rant, I was more talking about the involvement of the dads and how I think Mitch is letting a resentful, jealous, man ruin his career. But a contract, in my mind, includes both term and amount. So I may not have explicitly talked about it, but that’s how I think about all contract disputes. Both are obviously important because it affects the AAV. but the Marner camp seems more concerned with “more than Auston” or at least “equal to Auston” than they do with actual annual value.