azzurri63 said:
Ya I don't know anything about the game.
You clearly don't because players signed as RFA's aren't on the market and their salaries don't reflect market rates. A player's production relative to their salary is only meaningful in as much as whether or not you could replace them via the free agent market at a similar cost or if the money, again via players the Leafs could actually sign, would be better spent elsewhere. Players outpacing their RFA contracts don't alter the free agency market or what is actually available to teams in terms of using the money they have at hand. Nobody can sign a player like Pastrnak or Ehlers for that price on an actual open market so it doesn't reflect a realistic target for how those dollars should perform.
These are just fundamental concepts of sports economics that a child would be able to understand.