If Hall is just chasing money I think we can all kind of agree we can't compete against the top bid, but if he is willing to take a $1.5-$2M haircut it is plausible we can make it work without losing either or RNH or Nurse. That isn't to say it wouldn't be tight or we wouldn't have to trim some salary like Russell or Larsson. Also the fact that Nurse and RNH contract expiration dates are staggered helps a great deal as Nuge's money will come from a rising cap.
The catalyst to Chicago pushing through to being able to win a Stanley Cup was the Hossa pick-up and more recently for the Pens it was the Kessel acquisition, these are game breaking forwards that can propel a line to success. The difference between us and them is they were both already good teams and both had good depth, for us the good team thing is still up in the air and the depth clearly isn't there, so we'd clearly be doing things out of order, but players of Hall's caliber are real hard to come by (especially for this market) if he wants back I want to do our damnedest to make it work and try to fix the depth thing after the fact. It seems like people still underrate Hall cause he hasn't played for a winner, if you look into his analytics over the past 3 years he's a tier up on players like Patrick Kane, Artemi Panarin, and Alexander Ovechkin.