This contract situation is clearly the absolute biggest pivot point of the entire offseason. What Hronek ends up costing looms as an absolutely enormous defining factor in what else they can get done over the summer.
It's a tricky situation because on the one hand, he's been a surprisingly tremendous partner for Hughes. Helped allow Hughes to take his game to a completely different level. But there's a definite element of "coattail riding" going on there as well, which you hate to pay a premium for. His playoffs were also...pretty lackluster. Even just down the regular season stretch...he seemed to regress as the year wore on. Hard to completely extricate from the team as a whole cooling off a ton during that period post All Star break as well though.
Intuitively, he feels like a $6M defenceman who would probably be worth up to $7M on the "open market" with that RHD premium. But if he's asking for closer to $8M as rumored...that's a heck of a lot to pay for a complementary copilot to Hughes. To me, that has to kind of cap his salary ceiling at something around the Devon Toews deal. $7.25M. Different ages, very different ~style~ of defenceman...but for me, that's the real "high end" comp that brackets in what seems even remotely reasonable to offer him. I think Severson is probably the "lower range" bracket at $6.25M. Both contracts also being UFA rather than RFA...but with players in Hronek's situation one year out from UFA if they force the issue...we've seen that it functionally doesn't matter much anymore.
So much of their flexibility this offseason is contingent on what they can get done with Hronek though. He's the biggest ticket item and it's a tricky one.