Toronto Maple Leafs Roundtable: The Is the Cody Ceci Experiment Working?

James Tanner

Is the Cody Ceci experiment working?

Only if the Toronto Maple Leafs plan involves farm animals.  “Hey, we’ve already got a goat, what would you think about adding a turkey?”

Let us be clear: The Leafs could have walked away from Cody Ceci, but they didn’t because they knew that there was a small chance he could be rehabilitated and a risk-free guarantee that they could trade him if that didn’t happen.

So instead of getting nothing out of the Ottawa trade, they’ll get a sixth round draft pick.

Cody Ceci’s top potential is replacement player.  You could replace him with Kevin Gravel, Jordan Schmaltz, Rasmus Sandin, Timothy Liljegren etc.  and there’d be no loss of quality or chance to the team.

He is a bad player.

Mike Babcock’s insistance of playing him on the top pairing, against the best competition in the NHL (hard matching him recently against Kucherov, Bergeron, etc.) is nothing short of incompetent.

I’ve seen people list his stats and say it’s working.  These people do not understand the concept of opportunity cost.

Ceci’s most common linemates are Rielly, Matthews, Marner and Tavares.  Accepted analytical theory tells us that linemates have a 5x greater impact than a player’s competition, so it’s not surprising the results are OK.

But OK results are not acceptable for a top pairing player on a team looking to win a Stanley Cup. Ceci’s results are just slightly over 50% in all the main stats.  But if you replaced him with someone who could consider themselves Morgan Rielly’s peer, they’d be a heck of a lot higher.

For proof of this, head on over to naturalstattrick.com and switch the filter to see “relative stats” and you can see that, relative to his teammates, Ceci’s stats are all negative.

Not only should Ceci not be playing on the top pairing, he quite honestly shouldn’t even be on the team.  Travis Dermott cannot get back fast enough.