When two huge contracts are signed on the same day, the natural tendency is to draw parallels between them.

Marian Gaborik got seven years and a shade over $34 million from the Los Angeles Kings just a few hours after Ryan Callahan got six years and $34.8 million — plus a limited no-trade clause for the final two years of the contract — out of Tampa.

And people had the gall to sit there and ask, “Say, which of these deals was better?”

Well heck. It should be pretty obvious. Gaborik is a guy whose career points per game number is better than the best one ever posted by Ryan Callahan, just as a jumping-off point. Gaborik also has just one season — his age-18 rookie campaign — in which that number was lower than Callahan's career average.

But judging by points alone isn't really a fair thing to do in the case of these two players, in particular. Gaborik is an out-and-out scorer who has a reputation for not doing very much in his own zone. Meanwhile, Callahan is seen as a consummate defender who brings a kind of unyielding fervor to shot-blocking, checking, and so on. Callahan is a leader, Gaborik is not. What the Lightning were paying for, then, was not so much the points, though they'll take those as well, but the intangibles.

And paying for intangibles is a dangerously ill-advised thing to do. Long-time Devils defenseman cum hockey analyst Ken Daneyko went on the NHL Network yesterday and said, “Intangibles outweigh statistics.”

They do not, and not in any circumstances. If that were true, Shawn Thornton would be the highest-paid player in the league.

The fact of the matter is that what is considered “intangible” should have some sort of a tangible effect on the ice. Leadership, or accountability, or whatever you want to call “being good in the room,” should be provable. For instance, we should be able to dig into the numbers, of which we have so many these days, and point to some aspect of the sport, and say that his leadership results in improved performance in such-and-such a capacity. Players who are perceived to provide little or no leadership — Mikhail Grabovski, for example — should do something worse than Callahan. Or his teammates should do something worse when he's on the ice, but when you dig into them, that's not the case.

Over the last five seasons, Callahan's teams have done better, pretty much by any measure, when he's on the bench. And it's important to establish here that I'm using a five-year window because that brings us back to Callahan's age-25 season, the point at which he should technically have been most productive, while Gaborik — one of the elite shooters in the league — should have been starting to decline. By using the data below, it becomes pretty obvious that not only is Callahan not worth the $5.8 million freight for six years now, but he wouldn't have been over the entirety of his late 20s either.

For instance, is teams have a total corsi of 50.2 percent, and his own is just 49.4. Among forwards who have received at least 3,500 minutes of ice time at even strength during those five years, Callahan's relative corsi (minus-0.8) is 154th out of 194 in the league. Now, to be fair, Gaborik's is also negative in this regard (but marginally, at minus-0.1), but his numbers are still positive (50.3 percent).

So perhaps this is where the perceived defense provided by Callahan comes into play. He starts more of his shifts in his own zone than Gaborik does by a pretty wide margin (31.6 percent to 24.6 percent). In fact, Gaborik's zone starts are the easiest among the 72 forwards whose relative corsi is in negative territory since 2008-09. All that certainly helps contribute to the disparity. But you can adjust for zone start effects and it turns out that the impact was minimal; Gaborik (49.8) still remains ahead of Callahan (49.1).

But again, that's only over the last five years. Last season, the one perhaps most germane to discussions about what these players are going to be able to do moving forward, was one in which things were very different. Gaborik faced tougher competition and started a smaller percentage of his shifts in the attacking zone than did Callahan, and walked out with a better relative corsi to boot. Which is to say that even when sheltering Callahan at this point, he's not doing much for you.

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