(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.)

If you were paying attention in 2014, when Dan Girardi signed his six-year, $33 million extension, you knew trouble was coming.

Girardi was re-signed at that time because he was viewed as a stalwart defensive defenseman in his late 20s who provided the Rangers with a lot of value in their efforts to suppress opposing offenses. And to that end, you'd have to say that a fairly big chunk of his contract should just be deposited directly into Henrik Lundqvist's bank account.

It's easy to look like a stalwart defensive defenseman when the goaltender behind you is the best in the world on a year-in, year-out basis. Indeed, because at this point we understand fundamentally that Girardi is not a good defenseman and probably never was, one might be surprised to learn that over his entire career, his on-ice 5-on-5 goal differential is even. He's been on the ice for 450 Ranger goals and 450 opponent goals in 717 regular-season games.

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But what that kinda-sorta does not tell you is that Girardi is a huge drag on the team overall.

You have to understand is that the New York Rangers are an elite team in terms of outscoring the opponent at 5-on-5 over that time; their plus-161 is fourth in the league only behind Boston, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. So for Girardi to be even is actually not very good at all. Maybe it's good if he's a middle- or even bottom-pairing defenseman, and paid commensurately. But this is a $5.5 million defenseman we're talking about, who to this day is still one of the 21 highest-paid defenders in the league, and he will be until 2020.

When he's off the ice, the Rangers are at more than 55 percent goals-for, largely because of Lundqvist's overwhelming talent. They're a solidly middle-of-the-pack scoring team (13th in the NHL over that time) but have allowed the fewest goals. Girardi has been on the ice for more than a third of them, which to some extent stands to reason; he's played 36.4 percent of the Rangers' minutes in that time.

Over that long a period — 700-plus games — that becomes a fairly telling statistic. But obviously possession numbers are even more telling, and they don't tell a very good story about Girardi's defensive prowess:

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Around the time he signed the extension on March 1, 2014, the data suggested that Girardi was starting to drop off a little bit. In the previous 100 or so games, he'd delivered a negative relative possession number, but it was easy enough to poo-poo that as being the result of he and Marc Staal playing the most difficult competition the Rangers could give them. As you can see above, he was chugging along at a seemingly marginal shot attempt differential (minus-49 in 119 games since the start of the lockout-shortened season), but the rest of the Rangers were plus-288. A little while later, he began to drop off a cliff in earnest, while the rest of the Rangers continued steadily playing at a solid level.

The fact that he's at minus-773, or 46.6 percent since the lockout season, for that money, and still getting the minutes he does is astonishing in and of itself. Meanwhile, the rest of the Rangers are at 51.6 percent with him off the ice. Remember, too, that Girardi plays only a little more than 36 percent of the team's total 5-on-5 TOI. To get that low in that little time is pretty astonishing. It's the ninth-worst shot attempt differential among all skaters over that time, and everyone behind him was on the atrocious Buffalo, Toronto, or Calgary teams of the last few years.