You can and you do. The hometown discount has been a thing forever. And these players were not loyal to Ottawa. Come on now. EK was was talking about money and "when I go to free agency" and barely returned a phone call as far as I can tell. Duchene has not demonstrated loyalty to any of his three teams as of yet. Stone doesn't say much, so we ascribed a lot of loyalty and other qualities to him, but the fact is he left a fair offer on a table in Ottawa too. I wish we had our players here as much as anybody, believe me, but this casting them as helpless victims of Ottawa management has got to go. Everybody involved made choices that they own themselves, which they believed to be in the best interests of somebody or something.
Players only take hometown discounts when they believe that their sacrifice will enable the team to build a better roster around them. (See: Sidney Crosby)
Or, they take one because they love the city/community and want to live their for the duration of their contract. In most of these cases, the players simply don't want to uproot their family and take less money to make sure they don't have to. (See: Oliver Ekman-Larsson)
Two things stick out with Stone:
• Ottawa is not a cap team and doesn't need cap savings. They had plenty of room to surround Stone with a more competitive team, but they chose not to do so. He knew that if he took less, it wouldn't mean those savings are reinvested in another player. It's not like if Stone took 8M instead of 9.5M, they would've kept Duchene or went out and signed Panarin.
• Ottawa wasn't willing to give him a NMC for the duration of the deal. So even if he was okay with playing on a non-competitive, budget team because he loved living in this city, the Senators couldn't guarantee that he would play out the contract here.
Essentially, they asked him to take a hometown discount without offering him the chance to win or security in return. That's not how it works.