from Travis Yost of TSN,

Coming up with a Mount Rushmore of bad NHL contracts is harder than you might imagine. There was such an impressive run of ill-fated signings a few summers ago that you probably have at least a dozen qualified candidates.

Andrew MacDonald and David Clarkson seem to be right at the top of the list – your George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, I’d say. Many words have been spent on both of these players, but the story goes as follows: Philadelphia and Toronto ignored innumerable warning signs and abysmal underlying statistics, and paid a dear price. This, of course, is not hindsight. And it’s probably not a coincidence that three of the most out-spoken critics of these signings (including Cam Charron, Tyler Dellow, and Eric Tulsky) are all now gainfully employed by NHL teams.

There are many reasons why these players would end up on a theoretical Mount Rushmore, but perhaps the biggest driver is the fact that these contracts were so, so avoidable. Had either organization paid attention to the publicly-available data, they would’ve walked away. And fast.

Instead, they inked deals that more or less crippled their salary cap for a number of years.

The debate about who become Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt is probably much more interesting, but I think New York Rangers defenceman Dan Girardi is very much a candidate for one of those two hats.

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