The common reaction to the news: Relieved it’s over, widespread agreement this is a considerable overpayment.
Looking back on the last nine months, it seems now that Kyle Dubas had accepted — sometime after the William Nylander ordeal and before the Auston Matthews contract — that he was going to live with overpaying his stars relative to “fair market value” based on historical comparables.
You’ll hear a lot of people point out in the aftermath of this Marner contract that it’s better to overpay star players than non-core players — true given the two choices, but it’s also a false dilemma.