Do any of his 48 playoff games define him then? Because none of them have been very good so far. Again, Johnson's role involved shutting down the opponent's top lines, and he STILL significantly outscores Stamkos while facing much harder competition. Stamkos's ONLY job was to score and he didn't do it better than Killorn for crying out loud. Expecting someone to turn into something they haven't been in any of their 48 playoff games is a little silly, giving them a contract based on the assumption that they turn into something else is how you get fired.
Stamkos has a 0.73 PPG average in his fairly young career in three post season appearances. There's nothing particularly awful with what he's done there other than the fact that Johnson and Kucherov outshone him in this last run.
His game is based on not having the puck. I don't mean to make him sound like a bad player, because he's outstanding at what he does, but what he does isn't very important to a successful team in this NHL climate. He doesn't carry the puck because that limits the usefulness of his one-timer. It's a great one-timer, but he needs to be able to disappear in the offensive zone to use it. There is simply no way Stamkos can become an above-average two-way center without sacrificing the foundation of his offensive game.
Well, good thing we have two highly skilled and creative forwards in Nylander and Marner who love to carry the puck, and Nazem Kadri who is being rebuilt as a puck ragging possession beast. The entire hockey world has seen what the recipe with Stamkos and St. Louis looks like. Why not try to re-create this instead of worrying that he isn't David Backes?
He can be the Kane to someone's Towes I guess (if he had Kane's playoff resume anyway), but if we're paying the offense-only player 11 mil, how much is our Towes equivalent going to be making? Where do we find a Keith-calibre D for 5.5 per year? Chicago couldn't afford both Towes and Kane unless Hossa and Keith were on illegal contracts.
Kane and Toews each make $10.5 million, so if you pay Stamkos $11 million, I guess you can pay the Toews $9.5 million one day, hypothetically if you want to go with those same totals. In any case the only way we get a Toews is to draft one and develop one internally, so that guy is going to be very cost controlled for a few years.
i.e. if we draft Auston Matthews, he's going to be on ELCs until 2019 at the earliest, and probably get bridged after that. Most of our bad cap will be long gone, and Phaneuf will have 2 years left on his deal by that point. How the hell is this even a concern?
My main point is that Stamkos, while a good player, is a luxury, not a necessity to building a contender. I don't think it's wise to make a luxury complimentary player your far and away highest paid player in a cap world. Even if we assume that he's a 40/80+ player for the duration of his contract (pretty unlikely), that's not good bang for your buck at 11 mil per year if your goal is to win playoff series. If you just want to see some pretty goals, then yeah it's a great idea.
The Leafs are in a building phase where they need talent everywhere, however they can get it. They are in 29th place, so they ought not to be in a position to say no to talent because you think the only way to win a cup is to replicate the LA Kings.
