Well, there goes the best free agent on the market – Marleau signed with the Sharks for four years and $27.6M. Marleau is being paid roughly at value – a shade under 3 wins a year at the moment – so there was no hometown discount. There’s some risk here – the salary cap won’t likely move up much over the next few years, and Marleau is 30 now, so decline and injury risk pop up, even for a guy who’s at the top of his game offensively and defensively.
Pavelski, on the other hand, took a bit of a discount on his RFA years, signing for $16M over four years. Given that RFAs take a typical discount of 40% over their actual value, this implies that the Sharks valued Pavs at $5.71M a year compared to $6.9M for Marleau. I'm not convinced that's correct – Pavelski's performance over the last two seasons has been on a par with Marleau aside from perhaps PP scoring talent, and at age 25, he still has upside. I think the Sharks saved themselves at least $1M on Pavelski's contract, if not $2M, which puts a win in their pocket over the next four seasons. It's tough to save money these days, so that's really the best you can hope for when you're signing your RFAs and UFAs.
