Zaddy
Registered User
- Feb 8, 2013
- 13,058
- 5,850
Jesse is currently sitting at a 13.5% shooting %. While his game may not look smooth at times, typically poor finishers don't shoot that high. Taylor Hall who I consider a poor finisher for a star player has only shot over 13% twice in his career and the only time that he bettered Jesse's current shooting % was in his Hart winning season.
IMO he needs to work on getting his shot off quicker on the rush when carrying the puck, but beyond that he's doing fine finishing wise.
Looking at shooting percentage in isolation doesn't really tell you that much. 13.5% is a lot higher than in any of his previous seasons (his career-average including this season is 9.4%, which is rather low for a top6 forward, Hall is at 10.2% by the way). The explanation for that, in my opinion, is two-fold:
a) he's spending a lot of minutes with players like McDavid and Draisaitl which means he is likely to be getting some amazing set-ups and scoring chances. That in itself will improve his shooting %. Naturally the inverse is also true, his shooting percentage was probably lower in previous seasons because of playing with worse linemates.
b) his finishing ability has likely improved from past years and/or he plays with more confidence now.
Jesse isn't really a volume shooter either so that would skew his shooting % higher if he plays with linemates who consistently sets him up for high-quality scoring chances. Say he played on a 2nd line with Kahun and Nuge for most of the season, then he'd be more relied upon being a finisher and would likely take more shots, in which case I think his shooting % would likely be a decent bit lower than 13.5% and more in line with his career average.
Hall is not really a good comparison because he actually is a volume shooter. His career-high in shots (286) in a season are over twice as many as Pulju's career-high (136). Even comparing those two seasons Hall had 9.09% and Jesse 8.82% despite shooting more than twice as much.
Either way I don't think shooting percentage really tells you much about a player. There are so many more variables involved you need to take into account like linemates, volume, where he is shooting from etc for it to have any sort of value as a gauging tool.