Celebrini making it look easy with Sharks in 2nd NHL season

SUNRISE, Fla. -- It was hard not to be drawn to the flying fists, the veteran goalies facing each other head-on in the San Jose Sharks’ defensive zone. It’s not often, after all, that goalies fight these days in the NHL, a relic of an earlier time in a League that is no longer the Wild West.

But if you could draw your gaze away from the spectacle of San Jose's Alex Nedeljkovic and Sergei Bobrovsky of the Florida Panthers on the ice Monday night, fasten them upon the Sharks bench, there was another spectacle to behold.

There was the Sharks’ future, eyes wide and faces split by grins, their sticks tapping the boards, their hands tapping each other, their joy writ large.

In the middle of the crowd, between Will Smith and Michael Misa, stood the most important of them, a player who is the key -- to the exuberance of a team on the rise, to the veterans somehow looking to him, to the opposing coaches in awe of a teenager.

He was, in that moment, exactly who he is, a 19-year-old living a life he both could never have imagined and always did imagine, overcome by emotions, loving exactly where he is and who he is.

And why not?

Because right now, Macklin Celebrini has it all.

* * * *

Sophomore seasons are supposed to be hard.

The League is supposed to adjust to a player, and that player is supposed to need time to adjust back. But that hasn’t been the case this season for Celebrini, a player who came in third in the voting last season for the Calder Trophy, awarded to the rookie of the year, and who has followed up with a season that could just net him the Hart Trophy as MVP.

He has 74 points (26 goals, 48 assists) in 50 games this season, leading the Sharks by a whopping 40 points over the 34 scored by Tyler Toffoli and Alexander Wennberg, who are tied for second. He entered Saturday tied for third overall in the NHL with Nikita Kucherov, trailing only two players who have both previously won the Hart, Nathan MacKinnon (87 points) and Connor McDavid (85). And he has been named to Canada’s roster for the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.

“I work to put myself in this spot,” Celebrini said. “I feel confident, I believe in myself, I believe in my abilities. But at the same time, it’s still the best league in the world.”

And yet, Celebrini, who next takes the ice Tuesday for a game at his hometown Vancouver Canucks (10 p.m. ET; SNP, NBCSCA), is making it all look so very, very easy.

“He’s having a storybook sophomore season,” said his father, Rick Celebrini. “This kid keeps surprising us the last number of years. He just keeps seemingly [setting] these unrealistic goals and then, despite our warnings -- a parent’s job is to support and to encourage, but also to be realistic -- somehow, what do we know? Because he keeps proving us wrong.”

He keeps proving he belongs.

But it’s not just the point totals, not just the offensive plays of someone wildly talented, the skating and the release, the dangles and the shots. It’s the rest of it that makes those in the know -- both teammates and opponents -- take notice.

It’s the game that is wildly beyond his years, the responsibility, the calm, the attention to detail and game knowledge, the understanding and the IQ. It’s the early development playing in all three zones, as San Jose forward Ryan Reaves noted, the ways in which he doesn’t cheat, in which he’s willing to go into corners, to backcheck, to hit, to play a physical game.

The ways in which he leads.

Asked if he was shocked about Celebrini’s emergence, Sharks general manager Mike Grier said recently, “A little bit. I don’t know if shocked’s the word, but it’s surprising for sure. But maybe I shouldn’t be because I know the work that he puts in every offseason to get better and the drive he has to be the best, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

“I’m more impressed by how he handles [the media] and the pressure and the things off the ice. It’s a lot to ask of a 19-year-old kid and he handles it much better than I would have at 19, that’s for sure.”

And it’s not only those inside the organization who have noticed. As Celebrini passed through Florida last week, playing first against the Panthers and then against the Tampa Bay Lightning, he had two opposing coaches, both of whom have won the Stanley Cup, effusively praising his game, praising him.

“He’s the most impressive young player that I’ve seen in years in maturity of the game,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “Usually these guys come in and they have a gift that just nobody else has, they’re just much faster or much more skilled or more offensively gifted than other players. But you don’t really see young players come in with an exceptionally well-rounded game marked by the plays they don’t make.

“He’s got [74] points, but he doesn’t cheat for them.”

That means he doesn’t do what so many kids coming into the NHL do, doesn’t try for plays that he shouldn’t try for, doesn’t force pucks that he shouldn’t force.

Maurice recalled a game between the two clubs during Celebrini’s rookie season in which the center made a cross-ice play that was, as the coach put it, special. It was a risky play, though, on the edge of being too dangerous to try against a team that had already won the Stanley Cup and would go on to win it again.

Later in the game, Celebrini was faced with nearly the same situation, but with the Panthers a little tighter, a little better positioned.

He didn’t try it.

Maurice remembered thinking, “Oh, this guy’s on top of it. He’s going to be a captain and he’s going to be a great leader.”

It was a feeling that has only gotten stronger as Celebrini has attacked his second season, as he has opened even more eyes, as he has built on all the strengths that he flashed in a rookie season in which he scored 63 points (25 goals, 38 assists) in 70 games.

“A kid that’s wise, well beyond his years,” said Lightning coach Jon Cooper, who will be Canada’s coach at the Olympics. “I mean, he’s 19. I sit here and my 15-year-old’s sitting right back there in the back row, have a 17-year-old sitting there and it’s like, wow, he’s just a few years removed from their age.

“It’s pretty remarkable, just his skill set and everything. He doesn’t play a kid’s game, he can play a man’s game.”

* * * *

When Rick Celebrini was hired as the director of sports medicine and performance by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors in August of 2018, he had to rush off to his new city, with his wife, Robyn, and their four kids remaining back in North Vancouver.

It was a handful.

“[Macklin] would wake up Robyn every morning at 4:30 in the morning and literally sort of shake her and say, ‘Mom, can you drive me down to the rink?’” Rick recalled of the then-12 year old before his 6:30 a.m. practices. “And this is in the middle of winter when it’s cold and it’s raining and it’s ugly outside and he’s got all his stuff ready to go.

“That’s how much he loves it. He’d sacrifice sleep, he just wanted to get down to the rink.”

It was also when they realized that Macklin might be built a little differently.

Reminded of that, Macklin laughed.

But what was it about the game? What did he love so much that he was willing to get up before dawn, get his bag packed and risk waking his mom up before her alarm?

“That’s a good question,” Celebrini said. “I don’t even know. I found it fun and, I mean, obviously I had a dream of playing in the NHL. I wanted to be the best I could be.”

He still does.

That’s why, last summer, he was laser focused on preparing himself for the rigors of his second season in the NHL, a season in which the expectations would be higher, with a chance to make Canada’s Olympic team, a season in which the demands would be ever greater with a compressed schedule.

He took no shortcuts. He never has. This, after all, is the same kid who came to Boston University in 2023-24 coming off shoulder surgery, who blew past the timeline originally set, who was so keen to get on the ice that he would sneak on in a regular jersey, bypassing the noncontact one designed for him, according to BU coach Jay Pandolfo.

That push has not stopped now that the season is in full swing. It has only grown.

“He wants to continue to get better,” Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky said. “Even though he’ll have two goals and an assist, the next day we meet and we’re talking about D-zone coverage and puck play in the D zone and, yeah, he’s very accountable. The accountability that he has is what makes him great and is what is going to drive this organization forward for years to come.”

* * * *

It is, perhaps, a perfect marriage of team and player. Because it would be easy, on a team that was more veteran, more businesslike, less amenable, for Celebrini to be swallowed up by the demands, by the pressures of his position. By being him.

On the Sharks, he is not. His spotlight is smaller, by virtue of playing on a team that came into the season with modest expectations, on a team that plays in the Pacific time zone, on a team on which teenagers are more a rule than a rarity.

He is allowed to have fun, to have sleepovers, with Toffoli joining him and Smith on a cot in a hotel room, to whack Smith with ping-pong balls, producing welts and laughter in equal measure.

It is a gift.

“There’s athletes that are just all joy and they have to have joy with everything that they do, and that’s how they have success,” Rick Celebrini said. “And then there’s other athletes and players that are very serious and they’re very locked in and that’s just their personality and their disposition, and that’s what makes them work.

“I think Macklin -- he needs both. He needs balance.”

Enter Smith, 20.

“When he gets on the ice he’s still that same kid where he won’t give an inch to anyone,” Rick said of his son. “When you’re wired like that you really do need a release, you do need to be able to shut it off and you can’t be that intense all the time of serious. And so I think that’s where even his friendship with Will now, it’s so good for him.”

The two are tight, their bond on display on Dec. 13, when Celebrini defended his friend against Parker Wotherspoon when the Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman laid a hit on Smith that would put him out for the next month.

It was a moment, as Smith admitted on his return, all over his TikTok.

TikTok, in fact, is not an unfamiliar place for the Sharks teammates, their antics popping up everywhere, from their street interview with Judi Jupiter to their recreation of a famed scene from “Dumb and Dumber.”

As Smith put it, “I think when you’re 19 and 20, you’ve got to have fun off the ice. We’re still supposed to be in college.”

Celebrini said, “We have such a great group, tight group, and I think that’s where it comes from, that kind of joy and all the videos that you see online. We’re not doing that for the camera, for attention, we just like having fun.”

It is what balances the stress of the NHL, especially for a player of whom so much is demanded.

“You try not to hold the weight of it,” Celebrini said. “Obviously there’s lots of expectations and pressures. You want to do well, you want our team to win games. … So I think it’s just kind of keeping it light, having fun, obviously when it comes time to work, you work, but try not to hold that weight and that pressure of it all.”

* * * *

Just as Celebrini wasn’t supposed to be here – near the top of the scoring list, on Canada’s Olympic team -- the Sharks weren’t supposed to be here either. They were ticketed for another season out of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, another season of growth, but one more likely to end with a lottery ball than a playoff game.

But the kids have grown up fast.

The Sharks (26-21-3) have 55 points, sat in the second wild card spot in the Western Conference entering Saturday and are steps ahead of where they were anticipated to be. That starts with Celebrini.

“The way he drives our group into the fight, the way he drives and plays a 200-foot game is super impressive for a young player,” Warsofsky said. “The way he defends. He’s arguably one of our most physical defensive players and can close and kill plays, and the way he can drive pucks in the offense.

“He’s obviously had a really good year and has really put people on notice of who he is, that’s for sure.”

With that, though, comes the pressure. After all, as Warsofsky said, “We’re asking him to be our guy every single night.” It’s something that can catch up to Celebrini at times.

“He’s done an unbelievable job handling that, ignoring the noise,” Warsofsky said.

Which is why the respect for Celebrini is evident, whether it’s from his own coaches, opposing coaches, veteran players on his own team or veteran players on others. (“His ceiling is endless,” Panthers forward Carter Verhaeghe said.) It has only grown as Celebrini has shown himself to be grounded and humble, the first in line at practice, the driver of the group.

“I just think it starts with the passion he has to get better every day and how much he loves the game,” said Pandolfo, who still coaches Macklin’s brother, Aiden. “It’s every day.

“Everything he’s doing has a purpose. He’s going on the ice to get better. He’s going in the gym to get better. And it never stops. He just has this level of competitiveness and drive that the greats have. You have to have that. And he has it.”

What does that mean, then? How good can he be?

“What he’s doing as a 19-year-old is absolutely ridiculous,” Pandolfo said. “He’s not going to let up. I know he’s 19, putting these kind of expectations on someone, but if he continues to grow at the rate he’s growing, he’s going to be one of the better players to ever play the game.”