Monday Morning Dallas Stars Roundup: Cody Ceci, Officiating, and Moves Still to Come

And a Marc Crawford mention (sorry)

You probably know a couple of things about Cody Ceci since Jim Nill traded for him over the weekend. Most importantly, of course, that Ceci has an adorable dog:

Ceci was, as so many veteran NHLers are, a first-round pick, going to Ottawa at 15th overall in 2012.

You might also know that Ceci and Mark Stone are married to two sisters whom they met while both Stone and Ceci were playing for the Ottawa Senators.

If you were watching the game against Columbus last night, you also might know that Cody Ceci led the Stars in 5-on-5 ice time. He ended up with 22:16 overall, which was just a hair behind Esa Lindell’s team-leading 23:51.

But the one thing that Very Online People know about Ceci is the same thing Elliotte Friedman mentioned in 32 Thoughts Monday morning: that Ceci has become one of those players that it’s cool for the internet to dunk on.

In our story after the trade the other day, we here at Stars Thoughts talked about how Ceci bears some similarities to Roman Polák, whose underlying numbers were, like Ceci’s, less than inspiring before his arrival in Dallas. But where Ceci differs from Polák is in his ups and downs; Ceci was a very solid second-pairing defenseman at the end of his time in Ottawa, but he’s struggled to reach those same heights in later stints with Pittsburgh, Toronto, and of course Edmonton.

The well-connected Friedman mentioned two other things about Dallas’s defense today, so let’s start with the first: that Ceci tends to be very solid as long as you don’t ask too much of him.

You can see the evidence of that in the chart below, which is from Ceci’s more comprehensive player page on HockeyViz:

There’s a really strong correlation between the escalation of his minutes (the bottom graph) and the degradation of his defensive impact (the middle graph). When Ceci has been kept to lower minutes, he’s generally been more successful. But when he’s played like a first-pairing defenseman (as he was for a bad San Jose team this year), his impact has been much less reliable.

Ceci is notorious for trying to do too much at times. When you’ve grown up being one of the best hockey players in town for most of your life—and the 15th-best hockey player in the entire draft—I’m sure that’s a habit that’s hard to break. But like with Ryan Suter last year when he was relegated to third-pairing duty, I believe there’s a place for Ceci on this team. But that’s related to the second thing Elliotte mentioned on the podcast today.