The Curious Case of Cody Ceci
Why do coaches like him so much?
Cody Ceci has a lot of positive attributes. He’s big (6’3”, 210 lbs). He’s a right shot. He’s physical. He blocks a lot of shots. He can shoot the puck hard.
He also had some of the worst on-ice results of any defenseman in the NHL playoffs this year. Per Evolving-Hockey, Ceci and his partner Esa Lindell gave up near one more expected goal per hour of ice time than they created at 5-on-5 this postseason. This has been a recurring theme throughout his career, as Ceci has consistently been just above a replacement level player in the regular season. In the playoffs, he’s never posted a positive xG differential relative to his teammates. Cody Ceci is not the only reason the Dallas Stars fell short in the Western Conference Final, but his usage and performance in that role were undoubtedly a major contributing factor.
What makes Ceci fascinating to me, is that his usage and his observable on-ice value are so at odds with each other. This may not seem that strange — NHL teams often have a weak spot for big right shot defensemen — but Cody Ceci stands out in a way that I believe is truly aberrant.
This isn’t intended as a hit piece. As we’ll see, Cody Ceci has performed well in a limited role and there are aspects to his game that grade out well. Instead, I want to look at how no one seems to agree on what kind of player he is.
Looking at his contracts and his trade history, it appears general managers generally rate him as a depth defenseman, albeit one who can play up the lineup. Advanced stats at their most charitable support that assessment, though mostly rate him slightly below that. However his (many) coaches almost universally seem to rate him higher than that, consistently giving him major minutes, even when he fails to perform in them. Other large, right shot defensive defensemen tend to either have been highly valued by a general manager, or put up at least one season of good results, or see their ice time fluctuate under different coaches, but not Cody Ceci. He’s been remarkably consistent in how he’s valued, how he’s performed, and how he’s used, and those three have consistently been in conflict with each other. I want to know why.
Career Overview
All contract history is via PuckPedia.
Cody Ceci was drafted 15th overall in the 2012 NHL Entry draft by the Ottawa Senators after a high scoring draft year. The 2012 draft was a truly underwhelming draft whose highlights are the last true bust of a first overall pick, a bizarre early run on defensemen (eight of the first ten picks) and an incredibly strong goaltending class with five future Vezinas (three for Connor Hellebuyck counting this season’s, which is yet to be announced, and one each for Andrei Vasilevskiy and Linus Ullmark) and Frederick Andersen. A few top line, but not elite forwards (Filip Forsberg, Tomas Hertl, Tom Wilson, maybe) in the middle of the first round and a handful of defensemen taken in the third round or later (Esa Lindell, Shayne Gostisbehere, Colton Parayko, Jaccob Slavin) round out almost everyone else of note from this draft. Still, Ceci entered the NHL with the pedigree of a mid-first round draft pick.
Ceci made his NHL debut just a season later in 2013-14 and has remained an NHL regular ever since. In that time, he spent seven seasons in Ottawa, going to arbitration in 2018-19 and signing a one-year contract for $4.3m. The next offseason, he was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs as part of a salary dump for the Leafs and signed another one-year contract, this time for $4.5m.1 During the next offseason, he signed another one-year contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins for $1.25m, followed by a four-year contract worth $3.25m per season with the Edmonton Oilers, both below market value.2 He played three seasons with the Oilers before they traded him and a third round pick to the San Jose Sharks ahead of the 2024-25 season as part of a salary dump of their own. The Sharks then proceeded to flip him and Mikael Granlund to the Dallas Stars ahead of this year’s trade deadline in return for a first and a conditional third round pick.
In contract negotiations with five different general managers, Ceci has never signed a contract suggesting he’s a core piece. His two highest cap hits were below 5.5% of the salary cap: the one-year contract he was awarded in arbitration and the one-year deal he signed in Toronto after being acquired via trade. Neither of those represent a commitment given their term and both teams moved on at the conclusion of the contract. His largest contract was a four-year deal worth 4% of the salary cap at the time of the signing, roughly the equivalent of a medium to high-level 4D, by my estimation.3 In the three times he’s been traded, he’s been traded for a second/third line forward, had a pick added to be traded for a depth defenseman, and been packaged with a second line forward for a conditional pick. This is somewhat subjective, but his trade value has been roughly in line with his contract values: a borderline second/third pairing defenseman.
Over his twelve season career, however, Ceci has averaged 20 minutes or more per game every season since 2015-16 under ten different coaches, with the only exceptions being his time with Sheldon Keefe and Mike Sullivan.4 That’s unambiguous Top 4 usage, often bordering on top pairing usage. Put another way, over his last nine regular seasons, he’s been his team’s second most used defenseman five times, its third most used once, and its fourth most used defenseman three times, and its fifth most used once.5
He’s made the playoffs eight times, seven in his last nine seasons, and in those appearances, he’s reached the Conference Final four times, once with Ottawa, twice with Edmonton, and once with Dallas and advanced to the Cup Final once: with the Oilers in 2023-24. Once the playoffs started, Ceci’s role (i.e., average TOI ranking) has increased three times and decreased just once.
I bring all this up to establish part of what I think makes Cody Ceci unique: coaches absolutely love him; much more than general managers do. While it’s fairly well-known that hockey men favor big, physical defensemen who block shots, sometimes to the detriment of the team, I struggle to think of another case where a similar defenseman got such big minutes without also cashing in with a big contract at some point or being traded for a major piece. Although general managers have generally liked Ceci more than advanced stats suggest they should, as we’ll see in the next section, they still haven’t liked him as much as their coaches apparently do.
The Advanced Stats
All the usual disclaimers about models apply here. No model is perfect, but when there’s broad agreement about a player across models and throughout his career, that should give us more confidence the models are onto something. And in the case of Cody Ceci, the models are consistent.
According to HockeyViz, Cody Ceci has rated as a third pair defenseman for essentially his entire career, with a handful of seasons in which he played at a low-end second pair level. Somewhat surprisingly, given the beating he’s taken on social media, only three of his seasons have rated as below NHL-caliber. He’s not a bad defenseman, he’s simply been overpaid and overused by his coaches.6
It crossed my mind that Ceci was perhaps being used appropriately in relation to the teams he’s been on. Many of these teams were considered weak defensively, so maybe Ceci was consistently a top 4 option on the team, despite not playing like one. This doesn’t appear to be the case though.
Early in his career, Ceci put up good numbers a more limited role and saw his role increase each year in response. For some reason Guy Boucher was enamored with Ceci, though the 2016-17 Senators were not a very strong defensive group, and that was the start of Ceci being overplayed nearly every consecutive season afterwards. During his one season in Pittsburgh, Mike Sullivan reduced his usage significantly and Ceci put up his best results since he was on his entry level contract. This leads me to believe that Ceci is an effective player in an extremely sheltered role and for some reason, coaches have persisted in the belief that what he does scales up the lineup, despite all evidence to the contrary.
What Ceci Does Well Statistically
As poor as his overall results have been, I don’t believe that Ceci’s coaches are simply stupid or have been hypnotized by his size and handedness. Too many of his coaches, plenty of them good coaches, have played him both above his results and above his contract for me to believe it’s something that simple. Instead, I think they see things they specifically like about his game that they want more of, hence his disproportionate ice time.
His All Three Zones microstat card from his three full seasons in Edmonton reveals some of what he’s valued for (courtesy of Corey Sznajder’s tracking).
That’s a lot of reddish orange (bad), but a lot of these categories are related to offense. Ceci hasn’t gotten more than 10 minutes of power play time in a season in years, so he’s not getting gobs ice time because of what he brings offensively. If we focus on the DZ Retrievals/Exits section, we start to see what his coaches might be seeing in him. Namely, Ceci doesn’t botch his retrievals. He’s decently good at getting exits off of retrievals. He fails his exits at a very low rate. In other words, he grades out pretty well at getting the puck out of his zone, especially off of dump-ins.
However, the stats Ceci excels at are mostly stats where fewer is better and Ceci doesn’t touch the puck that much. For example, we can see that Ceci rates extremely well at botched retrievals, making very few mistakes when he retrieves the puck. However, he rate extremely low in retrieval attempts. If we take a few of these and turn them into success rates.
Below I plotted the distribution of retrieval success rate7, exit success rate8, and exit pass success rate9 for all defensemen with at least 30 games tracked between the 2021-22 and 2024-25 seasons and compared Ceci’s performance with the distribution of the rest of the population. This allowed me to compare Ceci to 243 other defensemen, or a little over seven per team.
Ceci performs pretty well here, all things considered. He’s not outright bad at anything, playing right at the level of a second/third pair tweener. I think his low failure rate as the result of getting fewer touches is probably part of why so many coaches have seen him as a “safe” player who can eat minutes. There’s probably some bias here overvaluing a lack of mistakes compared to value created offensively, but I was surprised to see him rate so well here and his usage becomes (slightly) more understandable.
Comparables
Now we get to the crux of this piece, are there any other players like Cody Ceci? To figure that out, I looked at his similarity to other defensemen who had played every season from their age 22 season to their age 30 season, using Evolving-Hockey’s age calculation because that is the season Ceci’s usage starts to exceed his ability.10
Since the 2007-08 season, 110 other defensemen have played every season from ages 22 to 30. I calculated similarity scores using Euclidian distance for each defenseman with every other defenseman in the dataset using number of games played, TOI per game, best season of combined WAR, and total combined WAR minus the best season of combined WAR all scaled from zero to one. Of those, Ceci rated the 10th most unique.
Ceci’s top 10 best comparables in terms of usage and results are Adam Larsson, Jacob Trouba, Marc Staal, Jack Johnson, Brenden Dillon, Brady Skjei, Roman Polak, Dmitry Kulikov, Damon Severson, and Nick Leddy. Of those, Larsson, Trouba, Polak, and Severson are similarly sized right shots, so size and handedness are certainly part of the explanation for what’s going on here. Staal, Dillon, and Kulikov were also all known primarily for their defense rather than their offense.
However, something still sticks out that’s unique to Ceci, and that’s how general managers have valued him. Larsson was famously traded one-for-one for Taylor Hall and has signed contracts for six and five years at over 5% of the cap, signaling him as a core piece. Trouba signed an eight year deal at nearly 10% of the cap and was named captain of the New York Rangers. Mark Staal signed five and six year contracts at 6.7% and 8% of the cap respectively. Jack Johnson was traded one-for-one for Jeff Carter and signed a seven year contract at 6.8% of the cap. This is not to say any of these valuations were good valuations, but at least these various general managers and coaches were close to being on the same page.
The rest of the top comparables saw their usage decline or don’t play the same style as Ceci. Dillon only saw his average time on ice exceed 19 minutes in three seasons (across five teams). Skjei’s game definitely skews more offensive with him hitting the 10 goal mark in each of the past three seasons (and 9 the year before, 8 on two other occassions). Kulikov exceed 20 minutes a night only once after leaving the Panthers team that drafted him. Severson and Leddy have put up significantly stronger results over their nine seasons than Ceci in addition to each signing much larger contracts than Ceci ever has.
Roman Polak is probably the best comparable player, though he rates just sixth here. He never signed for more than 4.3% of the cap; a five-year deal with St. Louis that’s fairly close to Ceci’s four-year contract with Edmonton. His ice time never quite reached the highs Ceci’s did, and his overall performance was slightly better, both single season and across the full nine seasons examined. Still, I believe this is the closest match I’m going to find across general manager valuation, usage, and performances. Unfortunately, he retired before All Three Zones updated their tracking method, so I can’t compare his microstat profile.
While every player is different, and each comparable can be nitpicked to death, I think the available data supports the idea that Ceci is one of the most unique defensemen in the league in terms of discrepancy of valuation. Just looking at usage and results he stands out, and when general managers’ revealed valuation via contracts and trades is taken into account, the comparables look even less apt.
The Eye Test
Ideally, I would include some clipped footage here. All I have access to is his playoff run with Dallas though, and I don’t think it would be fair to Ceci to draw all my examples from one of the worst stretches of his career. I’m sure there’s more he does well than just what is captured on his microstat cards, but I’m not really qualified to dig into that. If there are any Cody Ceci stans out there who would like to chime in with other things he does that earn his coaches’ trust, please do! I’d love to learn more.
Conclusions
According to the advanced stats, Cody Ceci is a serviceable depth defenseman and he’s typically been valued as such by general managers. In that role, he’s still capable of contributing positively to an NHL team, even a good one. Despite an atrocious playoff, he’s not necessarily an out and out bad defenseman. However, the things he does well don’t scale up the lineup the way his coaches seem to think they do. The things he’s bad at get exposed too much with more ice time and he becomes a net negative player.
Cody Ceci is not unique in any of these things, but the level to which there is disagreement between advanced stats, general managers, and coaches is unique. Again, this doesn’t make him a bad player. Instead, he’s one of the most interesting examples of how the shape of a object can change depending on your perspective.
It’s always hard to assess individual value in multi-part trades, but in return for taking Nikita Zaitsev’s contract, the Senators also go Connor Brown and sent Ceci and a third round pick to the Leafs, plus some prospects who never made an impact in the NHL.
Ceci’s contracts these seasons came in roughly $500k and $900k below Evolving-Hockey’s contract projections these two years for contracts of the length he signed.
Ceci’s current AAV of $3.25m signed in 2021 is the equivalent of $3.55m in 2024-25: the 109th highest cap hit for defensemen that season. That would have put him in the middle third of 4D at the time. Add the small number of defensemen who play in the top 4 on entry-level contracts, and I think it’s fair to say he was rated as a low-end 4D at the time of signing.
Guy Boucher, Marc Crawford, Mike Babcock, Sheldon Keefe, Mike Sullivan, Dave Tippett, Jay Woodcroft, Kris Knoblauch, Ryan Warsofsky, and Pete DeBoer.
He played for both San Jose and Dallas in 2024-25 ranking second in ATOI in San Jose and fourth in ATOI in Dallas.
Evolving-Hockey estimates his career earnings have exceeded his career value by nearly $30m, most of that over the past 9 seasons.
(Retrievals - Botched Retrievals) / Retrievals.
Zone Exits / (Zone Exits + Failed Exits).
Exits w/ Possession (Passes) / (Exits w/ Possession (Passes) + Missed Passes).
Ages 23 to 31 using hockey-reference’s method.
The microstats on retrievals are pretty eye opening. Cici really leaves his partner out to dry - he gets the easy pucks, but nothing else.
This had to be tough on Lindell, who can retieve, but needs easy exits. Not surprising that the pair got caved - the pairing emphasized each players weaknesses.
Such fantastic work Aaron.
One thing that I think contributes to Ceci's misevaluation is that he checks off so many surface boxes that it's easy to get googly eyes over his ability to handle tough minutes. He can skate, he can pressure, he can block shots -- sounds like the foundation for a top four defender right? Except there are so many skills beneath the surface that make a player. In Ceci's case it's the lack of defensive scanning, and OZN planning. He never uses his teammates, nor does he have the spatial awareness to leverage his teammates for efficiency. I think it was Petey's breakdown where he noted that Game 5 power play where Ceci just barrels toward McDavid without even looking at where the pass might go, or if he had support to keep from biting so hard.
These little plays add up. But they don't really add up over the course of a game. It's a ripple effect of idle subtraction, where his big mistakes are indirect, and his small mistakes are very explicit, like not being able to clear the puck, or wiring too many passes into board battles already underway. In other words, he's the safest defender there is at a premium position. But safe is...as they say....death.
(Wouldn't be surprised if Ceci rated horribly on Micah Blake McCurdy's blueline traversal data.)