The JFresh card seems to match my eye test. Parayko is a very interesting player. He plays a ton of minutes, and he plays against some of the best competition in the entire league, so you always have to factor that usage into his numbers. But that card shows a lot of what I see when I watch him play.
I think his 1% EV offence is pretty well earned. He doesn't drive offense. Full stop. His overall numbers look....OK? this year, thanks to a career best shooting %. In his prior three years, he was shooting a combined 3.7%. His career shooting percentage prior to this year was 4.1%. He is currently shooting at 7.8%, almost double his career average, and well over double his average of the last three years. (Hence why he's in the 95% of Finishing) He doesn't move around in the offensive zone. He's not an aggressive pincher. He rarely does anything to throw off coverage and create seams to exploit. He doesn't find cross-ice openings for a one-timer. He doesn't hold pucks and try to beat people inside or outside. He doesn't even really walk the line with the puck when he does get it. When I watch him in the offensive zone, he basically stands at the point and if the puck happens to come to him with time he unloads a bomb, otherwise he dumps it into a corner for our forwards to go get. Personally, he's been an enormous disappointment over the last number of years on the offensive side of the puck.
Then you get to D. I think his D has some major positives, and some major negatives. I think he's a good, "Stopper," for lack of a better term. He's huge, he has a massive wingspan with his stick, he skates extremely well, and he has decently high hockey sense. He does a good job forcing players on zone entries to the outside and into making low percentage plays into areas where we (usually) have support. What he doesn't do (And I think our whole team struggles with this, and I'm not sure if it's coaching, lack of execution, etc) is stop controlled entries from occurring at the blueline, or beat an aggressive forecheck after a dump-in by either skating the puck up and out of the zone on his own, or making a good first pass under pressure. Far FAR too often I see him gallop behind the net to pick up a dump-in from Binner/Hofer, start to feel the pressure, skate towards the boards, and slam the puck off the glass. His D-zone Retrievals being very high and his Retrieval Success being very low makes a ton of sense to me - as I said before, the dude is huge and skates super well, so he gets to the spot first on dump-ins.....but then he doesn't have the ability to shake the forecheck and get the puck up and out.
People talk about how Parayko needs a different partner, and frankly, I'm not really sure. I think Leddy is the type of player Parayko needs to be effective. Not Leddy in specific, but a Leddy type player - a guy who skates well, forces chances to the outside, but then can retrieve the puck and get it out of the zone with either his legs or his stick. Parayko had his best seasons next to Jay-Bo, who is basically a rich-man's version of Nick Leddy.
I think Parayko is one of the more frustrating players on our team. He seems to have all the physical tools to be an absolutely dominant force on the ice, but he just kind of.....chooses not to be. I think he could be a solid supplementary piece on a Cup contending team, but he is very very far from being a necessary piece. I think we can build around him, but we shouldn't think of him as untouchable or a major focal point. Right now we can't move on from him due to the rest of our D being such dogshit, but if someone was offering a young, potential #1 Dman for him, I wouldn't say no. It would probably pull the plug on the "Retool," and turn it into a full on "Rebuild," and since no one is going to offer that for him, ah well.
