Interesting take, do you have some comparables your basing that off of?
I've taken a detailed look at pretty much all high-end players signed to post-ELC contracts in the cap era, and at time of signing, Matthews and Marner were two of the best players, only surpassed by a few.
The point of contention that many have is that they have convinced themselves that
raw points are all that are considered in contract negotiations, and all contracts signed must follow solely that raw point scale, or their contracts are a result of bad negotiations by bad GMs. In reality, raw points can create rather misleading conclusions across teams and eras in terms of a player's offensive impact, because PP
time so heavily impacts raw PP production. Many high-end contracts don't make much sense if we are only looking at raw points.
Fans here wanted the Matthews/Marner signings to be based on the idea that they are mediocre PP players, solely because of historically low PP time for players of their caliber. In reality, they were (and have continued to be) elite PP players according to every single measure, and did so despite not even playing with each other for the majority of their pre-signing sample.
I believe the best comparable for Matthews is Malkin, and I believe the best comparable for Marner was Kane or Rantanen (both of whom he was easily better than), but their contracts were consistent with pretty much all high-end players.
The pandemic flat cap has definitely impacted us, as they are incredibly recent signings, and like all contracts, were signed with the expectation of a cap that was going to rise in the coming years. However, all is not lost, and we don't need to make knee-jerk moves. We are a team with strong financial resources, and there are ways that we can exploit that in our current environment to fill in remaining holes. People also really underestimate the quality of Matthews/Marner/Nylander and the potential impact they could have through their primes. If it comes to it down the road, our players also have good value, made better by the fact that most have less salary than their cap hit moving forward.