This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2024-25 report →
Jesse Puljujarvi
Pittsburgh Penguins Right Wing
The 87th percentile of chance share and two goals from forty-six shots inside twenty feet.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | EDM | 28 | 1 | 7 | 8 | +5 | 10 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 41 | 2.4 | 11:15 |
| 2017-18 | EDM | 65 | 12 | 8 | 20 | -1 | 14 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 136 | 8.8 | 13:22 |
| 2018-19 | EDM | 46 | 4 | 5 | 9 | -14 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 53 | 7.5 | 11:57 |
| 2020-21 | EDM | 55 | 15 | 10 | 25 | +6 | 16 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 115 | 13.0 | 15:08 |
| 2021-22 | EDM | 65 | 14 | 22 | 36 | +22 | 20 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 160 | 8.8 | 16:14 |
| 2022-23 | EDM/CAR | 75 | 5 | 11 | 16 | -13 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 125 | 4.0 | 12:14 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 334 | 51 | 63 | 114 | +5 | 108 | 9 | 0 | 4 | 630 | 8.1 | 13:35 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
5 goals and 11 assists in 75 games — 16 points — at 12:14 a night between Edmonton and Carolina. Minus-13, 125 shots at 4.0 per cent, one game-winner, 32 penalty minutes.
55.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 87th percentile, across 865 minutes — a better chance share than any Pittsburgh forward who played six hundred of them.
And his ice finished 28-37 against an expectation of 38.74-31.06. Eleven goals short at the good end and six over at the other, which is a seventeen-goal swing on 865 minutes.
He started 54.5 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 69th percentile.
The Finesse Game
125 shots at a median of 26 feet.
Inside twenty feet: 46 shots on goal and two goals — 4.35 per cent, against a league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 53 shots and two goals, 3.77 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 24 shots and one goal.
That is a quarter of the league rate from close range, a third of it from the mid-slot, and it is the whole of the file. A hundred and twenty-three shots on goal produced five goals.
A 4.0 per cent shooting percentage against a career 8.1. Half of that gap is bad luck and the other half is six seasons of evidence: he has been under nine per cent in five of them.
178 tracked attempts, 88 wrist and 43 snap, and only six slap shots. 88.8 mph at the 37th percentile. The shot is soft, it is taken from good places, and it does not go in.
What he does do is get the puck to those places. An 87th-percentile chance share out of twelve minutes a night is not an accident, and it is the reason a third club has now given him a job.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 216 pounds, with a top speed of 22.9 mph at the 83rd percentile and 1.3 bursts above twenty a game at the 67th, on 2.00 miles a game at the 16th.
A big winger who is quick over the first thirty feet and plays very short shifts. The mileage is low because the ice time is.
He forechecks hard and wins the wall, which is where the chance share comes from: the puck is retrieved and turned back into the zone rather than carried through the middle.
32 penalty minutes in 75 games and 108 in 334 for a career. He uses the size on the boards rather than in open ice.
The Intangibles
Fourth overall in 2016, six seasons, 334 games, 114 points across Edmonton and Carolina.
The career is one of the more instructive in this edition. A top-five pick who has driven play everywhere he has been and has 51 goals in 334 games is not a bust in the ordinary sense; he is a specific and unusual kind of player, a winger whose underlying record is first-line and whose finishing is fourth-line.
He is twenty-five. That is young enough for the shooting to move and old enough that six seasons of it is now evidence rather than sample.
Pittsburgh signed him for the chance share and can afford to be wrong at twelve minutes a night.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
“He forechecks hard and wins the wall, which is where the chance share comes from: the puck is retrieved and turned back into the zone rather than carried through the middle.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 865 minutes
- Expected goals
- 55.5%
- 89th pct
- Shot attempts
- 55.3%
- 91st pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 28 for, 37 against. Expected: 38.7 and 31.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe numbers rank him 31 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.
Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 67 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 75 games
- Top speed
- 22.9 mph
- 86th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.33 a game
- Distance
- 2.00 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 88.8 mph
- 61st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2022-23 with EDM · 669 minutes at five-on-five
- Ryan McLeod25%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2022-23
- The club
- CAR took 58.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 55.5% — 3.4 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- 865 minutes at five-on-five — 45th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Darnell Nurse | 53.2% | 56.5% | 52.0% |
| Brett Kulak | 51.5% | 56.8% | 50.7% |
| Connor McDavid | 55.0% | 55.7% | 57.7% |
53.2% together, 56.5% for him apart and 52.0% for Nurse apart. He was better away from Nurse, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Nurse.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
175 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 38% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.