A player's contract matters.
Too many players not living up to their contracts can cripple a team. Then on the flip side, it's huge if teams can get contributions from players on team-friendly deals. In the salary cap era, those can be the difference makers.
Something we can do is take a player's cap hit and divide it by their goals, assists, or points totals to essentially calculate the cost of getting a point from that player.
For example, the Penguin who provided the most value relative to his contract in the 2018-19 season was Jake Guentzel, given that he was still on an entry level deal with a cap hit of $734,167.