Okay I know he's bad, but...
1. You have to still hit the cap floor.
2. He will have a cap hit on your team until 2027-2028 season
3. When Ottawa is contending this cap hit will be hurting the team to get solid UFAs or sign existing players to long term deals (Tkachuk, Norris, etc.)
4. Just eat some of his contract for a few years then buy him out so it's not such a long time he's on the team. Buy him out in like 2022/2023 offseason.
5. You have literally no RD already. Who's going to replace him.

Zaitsev definitely needs to go, but buying him out, then immediately giving Hamonic 5mil ain't the move.

They need to add a really good player on the right side for Chabot starting next year. Hopefully Zub or J.Brown can find that kind of chemistry with Chaboi that DeMelo had, but if not, they're going to need a steady hand with experience. Brannstrom and Wolanin should fill into important roles this year, and I imagine JBD will be ready to go at the end of the NCAA season, and Sanderson likely isn't far off. The reinforcements are coming, but there's still the issue of finding the right pieces to support what's going to be a really young core.

I almost think Ottawa is the very last team in the entire league that should be considering buying out 4 year contracts

Why OTT made that trade still baffles me. Just take Ceci to arbitration, walk from it, then wash your hands of the money for good.

Ya but if you buy out Zaitsev then you are approx 9-10 million under the floor and I don't think those two get you there unless Dorian is thinking of signing another UFA like suggested above Hamonic or bring back Hoffman? LOL

because they wanted brown and could get rid of ceci at the same time.

You could get rid of Ceci at arbitration. For free. Without taking a bad defenseman at $4.5M for 5 years. Brown is good add but he's not worth that contract.