How bad of a finisher is Nicolas Jackson

He's finishing below his xG but do we have enough information to make to draw a conclusion yet on him? Does it even matter from the Chelsea perspective either way?

If you spend anytime on line you’ll see something like the below posted and widely shared. It is the perfect bit of engagement catnip for people to latch on to and want to share.

For people that want to score points this will be used as a bad thing for a player, this is proof that he is a bad finisher. For some this will be a good thing, he’s gotten himself into excellent shooting positions and consistently generated high quality chances, they haven’t gone in but for the future that might not always be the case.

I think that presents an interesting question of, well what exactly this means and what should our conclusion be when we see something like this? This is an interesting statistical nugget but on its own it doesn’t really help us.

Thankfully that is something that we can try and figure out with a bit more digging and some more context.

For his big five League career he has a sample size of 199 shots over 4 seasons and 73.2 nineties. That is a decent sample size to try and understand him as a player.

Over that span on my xG model he has 41.2 expected goals and has scored 35 times. That puts him at 15% below expected for his goal conversion rates. Here is how it looks plotted over time for each shot that he has taken.

Until his recent cold streak he was below the xG generally, but also not by a significant amount and had tracked things pretty well overall.

Right now, he is in the middle of a pretty drastic cold streak where he has just 1 goal scored going back to December 8th, where he has played 14 matches, played 1000 minutes, taken 42 shots, and racked up 5.0 expected goals (from the FBref Opta Model).

One of the other bits of information here is that he did miss about 8 weeks due to an injury and while we don’t know if that is a reason for a downturn in execution it could be a contributing factor.

Overall, this bits of context would point to me that while we shouldn’t believe that he is an above average finisher, he might not be nearly as bad as the reputation that he is seeming to develop. He doesn’t look like a plus value added shooter, especially looking at his ability to place shots, where he has pretty consistently had his post shot xG placement run below the expected value of his shots.

This would point in the direction that while he might track overall somewhat close to his xG for his goals, there might be something to him being a long term below average finisher and that would raise questions on the ceiling for future performance compared to the chance quality that he gets.

The impact on his scoring looks to be in the biggest chances overall for him. This could be a situation where xG is overrating the chance quality of these but it does seem like from the antidotal memory of the highlights of some of his misses something that he just hasn’t been able to execute cleanly in those situations as well.

The heat map of his finishing would seem to confirm this suspicion. He doesn’t have many hot spots here but he is especially cold in the area of the box that is the most dangerous and generally the highest conversion.

Overall, we are still left with the unsatisfactory answer that we can’t fully rule out that this is just a bit of bad luck and variance going against him.

Given the quality of his shots, one standard deviation would have him between 36 and 46 goals scored and he is just outside of that one standard deviation range at 35 goals scored. That’s not a positive sign but it’s also not so much of an outlier to not be covered by random chance either.

Looking at his post shot xG, he looks well described by this metric and perhaps that might be the strongest case that given it has been consistently below his xG that he is a below average finisher. Given his expected finishing, his one standard deviation spread would be 33 to 41 goals scored and his 35 actual goals is basically right in the middle of that expectation.

The big question for Chelsea is would they be happy enough with everything else that he provides the team that being a 10-15% underperformer of his xG is okay with them.

Looking at his overall numbers the answer might be that given his age and potential for growth and improvement that they are. I find these type of players fascinating and while I find value overall in what they do, they can be tough players to carry on a team because they will almost always be the type of player that draws frustration from the fanbase and are targets for trolling from rivals.