inferior, no, but i think all those guys are way over priced.
and yes, they did have more leverage than he did.
anybody can sit out. to force a trade or an offer sheet.
what's the return on a 9 mill offer sheet?
gonna be interesting to watch what 6 mill gets you for impact on the ice with Lindholm vs 9.5 with Mcavoy.
Consider the reputational impact of your argument, and the effect it would have on McAvoy himself. Basically if you were GM you're saying, "Charlie, you see all those direct contemporaries of yours - Fox, Makar, Nurse, Jones - we think they're overpaid, and while we think you're as good as them, we here at the Bruins don't want to pay you that much. We're going to offer you $7-7.5 mil per year, because that's what we think is your true value. If you don't like it, you can sit out or wait for an offer sheet to raise the bar. That's how it is."
That's a serious whack to a guy's confidence. Extremely likely that in that scenario he ends up signing a short-term bridge deal and then getting out of Boston the second he becomes a free agent - why stick around after being treated like that when there will be multiple other teams lining up to offer big $$$? It also says to other young defenders in the league that the Bruins are a team to avoid, and you're probably also going to have unrest in the playing group because the team's star D has been treated poorly.
For what it's worth, in my head in isolation McAvoy's worth $8-8.5, but looking at the market I realistically would have liked his deal to be $9 mil p.a. An extra $500k is really just splitting hairs at that point though, so I can certainly live with what he eventually got. I do agree that the cost for top defenders is a little over-inflated. But almost every single one of those guys in the league is getting PAID, with the sole exception of Hedman who is on an extremely good value contract. In that scenario I just don't believe it's right or plausible for the Bruins to play hard ball when no-one else will.