At the time of the Palat contract signing there was a trend where teams were signing established veterans to these more lucrative contracts to bring them over to developing teams trying to improve. Palat, Killorn, Copp, off the top of my head and basically all of them have not aged well.
Taking a look around the league through puckpedia and Hockeyreference and looking for every teams worst contracts
1. No "Contender" is hampered with a contract as bad as Palat's except maybe Edmonton who are still paying Campbell for the next 4 years. (A few teams are lucky with LTIR)
2. There are definitely at least 10-15 worse contracts than Palat's and another dozen or so that have the potential to become far more disastrous in the future
I think it speaks volumes about the general quality of management around the league that every team better than us has mainly avoided giving out bad contracts in the last few years, and most of the teams worse than us have given out Palat level or worse contracts.
Palat is basically a 3rd liner, in terms of both ice time and production at this point making 6 million. This is already an issue. It's made worse by the fact he's getting thrown out there with Jack/Bratt and still putting up 3rd line numbers.
I do think he's still a Devil next season though. Buying him out nets us 2.4 million in cap. Not sure you get much more than a 30 point 3rd line LW with that money and that's already what Palat is anyways. So essentially you'd be just swapping the jersey name and number for the same production. I think a Palat buyout next offseason is far more likely