god i'm confounded by this kid . some clips you sent me months ago that made me, frankly, stare blankly into the abyss:
also found this as ig a benchmark for The Past:
compilation someone else made a while ago on yt that's old but illustrative
i think the thing that has me bewildered is that he just has such a One of Everything type style? like normally with any given skater theres kinda a consistent style.... like the way people talk. you talk to someone enough and you know they lisp a little or they always stutter on the same thing or wtv and if you watch the same people skate enough you eventually know that they hold their shoulders a certain way or they avoid a certain edge.
vs with parascak, there's a part in clip 2 where he's in a chase and he skates it reasonably well with his weight ahead of the vertical on the first couple of strides so he can push backwards and then coming back into a carrying stride:
(i'm a pretty dubious that his feet really come back to center well, which is a big thing he's gotten dinged for, but it's hard to tell from this angle so)
but then he just..... doesn't seem to ever do that again? in every other chase clip he's sitting way back with his knees straight looking like he's never skated in his whole life.
it's a similar story with most of his agility skills imo. like there's a couple of turns where he pulls his inside shoulder up and he looks pretty competent even under pressure. and then there's a BUNCH of turns where his shoulder is dumped in and he's tripping all over for no apparent reason at all?
re: the wide stance – it's hard to say really what he's doing from the angle that you see with OHL cameras? this is the big thing other people seem to comment on, though, and to me it still looks like he steps pretty wide and doesn't prefer to come to center with his feet, which causes some of the slowness bc he doesn't get a full push to either side. he's basically putting his feet down like 20% of the way into a stride (laterally) and then only getting that 80% of the pushing distance, and with the .... inexplicable lack of a first step push it's a struggle for him to really get moving or stay moving. (he also likes to coast with his feet Way The Fuck Out There which i find charming but probably a bad sign of his ability to learn to consistently return to center. but charming!! /\ <- me when i'm terik parascak)
(also interesting to me that he doesn't really avoid his outside edges as much as i would expect considering his /\ nature? he does plenty of turns and doesn't seem freaked out by them even though he looks like he's going to eat it fully 50% of the time. maybe rehabilitation is possible???)
i was trying to figure out if there was some kind of progression going on in the timeline, but from what you've said about timing of these clips... it seems like he just sometimes skates better and sometimes skates bad. i think with skaters this age theres still a lot of malleability (and a lot of pressure wrt going pro / stonks etc) so it's not like.... crazy to see. and also i try not to blame upon laziness/lack of skill what could probably be better explained by just injury + lack of time + exhaustion + occasional skills practices that get forgotten eventually + pressure within a game etc. but i truly dont know what to make of his progression because it seems more like a scatter plot and less like a line lol
as far as faring in Hershey – also hard to say!! i don't know a ton about east coast AHL so i'm not sure what the skating is like tbh. i do think there's an interesting thing at play with the juniors -> ahl/nhl pipeline where it's like.... your juniors league kind of functions as A Gender when you're in it. like in the same way that i.e. PWHL players will tend to adjust to each others play styles and not to NHL play styles and it's not necessarily about ability as much as it is relevance. i think the diff juniors leagues have a similar function where like... the W just isn't really known to be a skating league, so if you're a mediocre skater you can still be a good player on a good team because it isn't really a relevant skill within that competitive culture. vs the combine/draft/AHL/prospect lifestyle kinda scrambles everyone from where-the-hell ever and all of a sudden that skill might be really relevant. or not! he could just be a niche fellow who stands around and snipes and watches the puck sail back and forth past him for a successful 20 years. he could be travis konecny who has never had the same skating style for two consecutive minutes in a row ever in his whole career. who knows! magic eight balls says good luck
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