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Pierre Dorion is extremely overworked right now. He has one of the smallest front offices in the league and he has to deal with contract extensions/trade talks with their three best forwards. I doubt he has much time to relax these days, although one other thing he should be focusing on is a trade that moves Cody Ceci out of town. Last night, Bob McKenzie said that teams around the league were interested in acquiring him:
Look, I don’t need to re-hash my arguments about
why Ceci isn’t a good defenseman, because I’d be beating a dead horse. If you still think that he brings value to the team, I struggle to think of how you could finally change your opinion to think that he is actually not good. You can’t make the argument that he is young and developing anymore, because he just turned 25 in December and has played
409 games in his career...That isn’t somebody who is going to magically turn a corner.
Realistically, Ceci should have been traded in the 2016 off-season when he still had value around the league and was involved in trade rumours with players such as Taylor Hall and Jonathan Drouin. He had already played for two and a half seasons by that point and hadn’t shown and positive progression. Looking back, I can at least see why the Senators would have wanted to give him one more season just in case he was a late-blooming defenseman, so I wasn’t too upset with Ottawa giving him a bridge contract.
However, this is his third season since that original bridge contract, and his value around the league has only gone down. Dorion can’t exactly make the argument that he is getting better, because he really isn’t. He absolutely cannot make the same mistake that Bryan Murray made with Jared Cowen and wait too long until Ceci has essentially no value left. Ceci still has the pedigree of a 1st round pick, plus he averages 22:45 of ice-time per night, so other GMs might think he could be the next Justin Schultz.
I understand that Dorion will be preoccupied with more important matters regarding Mark Stone, Matt Duchene, and Ryan Dzingel, but moving Ceci should be the next highest priority. I see no scenario where his value actually goes up from now until the summer (or later), as he has actually produced worse shot results than his first couple seasons. He is at least an RFA in the off-season and not a UFA, so Ottawa should still be able to get something decent in return I think.
What exactly that would be, it’s almost impossible to say. It wouldn’t be anywhere near Hall or Drouin, but perhaps they could get an underperforming forward or defenseman who has a bit of a higher ceiling but a bust potential as well. Or maybe the Senators will be looking to load up on picks, and perhaps some crazy team will give up a 1st round pick just like the Oilers did to get underperforming Griffin Reinhart in 2015.
At this point, I would pretty much take anything for Ceci, but the point is that other GMs are somehow still interested in him, so it’s not as if a 7th round pick will be the only return. The longer Dorion waits, the more this becomes a Cowen situation, and one day the rest of the league will realize that Ceci simply isn’t effective and isn’t getting any better. He needs to do what he did with Curtis Lazar and sever ties before he loses any more value.
Getting a 2nd round pick (which turned into Alex Formenton) was one of Dorion’s best trades, and a potential Ceci trade that nets them something similar would be just as good. Everybody knows the kind of player that Ceci is, and there is simply no excuse to not trade him before the deadline, or at the very latest by the summer.
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