What We Learned: Yashin’s NHL return maybe the biggest joke ever

Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it. Remember when the Islanders bought out Alexei Yashin because he wasn't good enough to earn his contract any more (if indeed he ever was (and he wasn't)), and didn't really seem to care too much about things like playing hockey? Of course you do. Everybody does. Yashin signed that insane, insane, insane deal on draft day in 2001, and it has haunted the Islanders ever since. He got 10 years and $87.5 million. People give the Islanders a lot of somewhat-justified-but-not-entirely-due grief about the Rick DiPietro contract, but the Yashin deal might be the worst in NHL history. If it's not, it's a close runner-up to that Bobby Holik contract. He played just five seasons for the team before being mercifully bought out. During that t...