Small sample size, but Parayko-Fowler is actually not getting the heavy lifting. They have skewed more offensive in usage, and QoC seems more balanced than Parayko's normal. Though with 1 home game, I wouldn't read much into that.
Agreed about not reading too much into it, especially since the Rangers lines were a bit of a jumble without Panarin in the lineup. Fowler/Parayko played most of their minutes against the Chytil/Laf line that was the Rangers top line yesterday, but I don't know that this line would have shown up as the highest QoC line for the Rangers. Even without talking about small sample sizes, that was a weird game/lineup to draw conclusions against.
That said, they were the go-to pair after the Rangers scored to bring the game within 1. Monty put them on the ice following that goal, they were on the ice before and after the last TV timeout, and they were on the ice before and after the actual timeout. I'm guessing they played 5:00-5:30 of that final 8:23 minutes. The other 4 shifts were mixing/matching Faulk/Broberg/Suter.
My hope is that the plan is to keep Fowler-Parayko together as more of an all situations pair than Parayko's usage has been for the last few years. Then you can do a bit of mixing and matching in the bottom 4 as situations dictate.
Broberg-Faulk can be your regular 2nd pair, but Suter-Faulk can take a handful of defensive shifts together. Suter-Perunovich (or a rotation of #6 D) can get deployed with an eye towards matching them up against bottom 6 lines, with Broberg-Perunovich getting a few offensive zone starts together.
Let's say that there are 48 minutes at even strength in a game. You could selectively mix-and-match your pairs to get an end-of-game deployment that looks roughly like this:
Left side: 17 minutes to Fowler, 17 minutes to Broberg, and 14 minutes to Suter.
Right side: 20 minutes to Parayko, 19 minutes to Faulk, 9 minutes to Perunovich.
Parayko, Suter, Broberg, and Faulk are the 4 main PK guys and (hopefully) you get Faulk off the top PP unit with Fowler, Broberg, and Perunovich all as options to be on either PP unit.
Obviously not every game has exactly 48 minutes of even strength time and the score/flow of the game will dictate how often you are tapping a guy for an 'extra' shift. But I'm hoping that the above time split is roughly the goal to avoid just using Fowler as the next Parayko partner in brutal deployment. I really, really want to get a long look at how the two of them play in the role of a 'normal' top pair.
