People need to put these concerns into perspective regarding contracts Ottawa's going to have coming up in the next few years, and the cap hits some of the guys who are signed long-term but have a big cap impact. They have to be careful with managing their money.
Let's assume Hoffman signs for $6M/6Y, taking him through 2021-22 season. Over that period we have several other guys locked up with large cap hits. These guys include Ryan ($7.25M through 2022-23), MacArthur ($4.65M through 2019-20), and Phaneuf ($7.0M through 2020-21) but also Karlsson ($6.5M through 2018-19) and Methot ($4.9M through 2018-19) both of whom will need to be re-signed and with Karlsson getting quite the raise. (For simplicity sake I'm ignoring the cost of re-signing MacArthur after 2019-20 since it's close enough to the end of a potential Hoffman contract that I won't bother).
Ignoring Hoffman, that's $30.3M tied up in 5 guys already signed to long-term deals. Add $6M for Hoffman and we've got 6 guys signed to 6 long-term deals taking up $36.3M of cap space. Now consider that Karlsson will sign a new contract at $10M per and let's bump Methot up to $5M. That gives us $39.8M on the cap a few years from now. So ignoring all depth players who will only be making <$1M-1.5M a season (usually younger guys or depth FA signings and I'm not even going to guess who the hell they'll be several years from now because of how much turn over those positions tend to have) we have a lot of important/potentially important players to re-sign.
Players like Stone ($3.5M through 2017-18) will need a new contract and likely a pay raise (let's say a boost up to $5M), Turris ($3.5M through 2017-18, let's say a raise to $5.5M), Zibanejad ($2.625M through 2016-17 bumped to $3.5M), Ceci ($900k through 2015-16 bumped to $1.25M). Assuming all of these players stay, and they're likely to, and assuming we sign Hoffman for $6M... we're at $55.05 a few years from now. Let's assume we re-sign Anderson ($4.2M through 2017-18) in a couple years from now as well (bumped up to $4.5M), let Hammond go, and bring O'Connor up (going to ignore his salary). We're at $59.55M on the cap.
Note that I'm trying to be conservative with my estimates and only factoring in the salaries of 11 players. I'd assume my estimates are low, but a few years from now we'd be at nearly $60M on the cap icing a roster of 6F, 4D, and 1G, or essentially half a team. Consider that our entire team right now carries a $62.7M cap hit with $8.6M to spare. Whether this is an issue or not depends on the cap and actual cap hits when extending younger players. Since it's implementation in 2005-06 season, the cap has gone up by an average of 5.65% per season (pro-rating for the 2012-13 season). So three seasons from now let's estimate the cap is $84.19M. Signing Hoffman would likely eat up the majority of dollars we'd have to spare after signing all of our depth players, and if his performance drops off that's a serious issue.
I admit that all of these numbers are pure speculation, but it's the kind of thing a team has to give thought to. Could you move a $6M contract in Hoffman and get a cheaper, younger player like Drouin along with a pick or another prospect? It's something to consider.I can see Hoffman being a consistent 25-30 goal scorer for the duration of his next contract, I don't think that's being disputed. That said, he's has strong starts two seasons in a row then started to fizzle a bit toward the last third of the season. I don't think the argument is that he doesn't warrant a $5.5-6.0M contract, but rather whether it's worth the risk of doing that signing for a long-term contract like 6 years.