These are the best days of Macklin Celebrini's life—not just so far, but likely forever. The world is all possibilities, without the vaulted ceilings of reality or the low chandeliers of expectations. In hockey terms, he is Auston Matthews without the crushing burdens of being a Toronto Maple Leaf.
He is not new to you, constant readers. He is currently on a seven-game scoring bender—five goals and nine assists in those games—and at the I'll-need-to-see-your-ID-son age of 19, his consistent persistence and occasional genius puts him on a list of teenagers who averaged more than a point per game, a list with wall-to-wall Hall of Famers. And not just outer hedge Hall of Famers, but the Hall of Fame of Hall of Famers, like Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Dale Hawerchuk, and Steve Yzerman, and active A-listers like Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid, and Steven Stamkos.
In short, there is nothing about Celebrini’s career or year to date that suggests anything other than the happiest of endings when he retires in glory in 2052. But that's what we always imagine about every No. 1 draft choice without ever taking into consideration the fact that they are drafted by bad teams who tend to remain so. As the best players in the sport barely play a third of a game as part of the sport's essential structure, the ability of one player of barely voting age to enforce systemic change is limited.
Which brings us to the San Jose Sharks, for whom Celebrini delivers his nightly bounties, including the goal and assist in Saturday's 6-3 win over Vancouver. They obtained the right to draft Celebrini by being the worst team in the sport in 2024, and in fact have been the worst team in the sport since the pandemic, the karmic retort for making the playoffs in 19 of the prior 21 seasons. Their own glory days, Cupless though they were, had been replaced by abject failure on a nightly basis, and years of religious sellouts had been replaced by the encroachment of empty chairs at a rate of one for every two customers. In the Bay Area's shrinking media landscape, they failed to become even an afterthought even though the Raiders and A's are gone and Cal and Stanford are playing total strangers.
None of that is Celebrini's fault, of course, but blame assessment rides with the tide, and San Jose's future is tied inextricably to Celebrini's in the same ways that Chicago's are to Connor Bedard, and on through Matthews, McDavid, and MacKinnon. Indeed, of the last 15 first picks, only MacKinnon and Florida's Aaron Ekblad have won a Cup, and the others have found the weight of not doing so grows exponentially with every added year, with the estimable Taylor Hall having played for seven teams in his career in search of the thing he can probably no longer have.
These Sharks, though, have gone from being awful to being only maddeningly inconsistent. As you rose today, they were the last playoff qualifier in the Western Conference Sponsored By The Bizarro World, and their body of work is all fits and starts. They are defensively limited (they are 30th in goals allowed and dead last in shots on goal allowed) and heavily dependent on Celebrini's magic for their success (they are 8-0-1 when he has three points in a game, 13-2-1 when he has two or more, and 5-15-1 with one or fewer). But that's better than his work not moving the needle at all re: team success, as it didn’t last year.
Mostly, what Celebrini has brought is a need for impressionable fans to see the Sharks play, at least more so than their playoff position rivals in Los Angeles (all defense all the time), Utah (still Arizona but in different clothes), Seattle (bad after a good start), St. Louis (good after a bad start), and Calgary (locked in substandard stasis). Nearly a decade of richly deserved anonymity is over in San Jose because of Celebrini, and with it comes the slow creep of expectation that has eaten the souls of the Powers and Hugheses and Dahlins and especially Matthewses. Hope is a killer until the payoff, and the days of being the hot new toy in the shop don't last nearly as long as they think.
Celebrini is not there yet because the Sharks aren't there yet. They are still perceived in broad strokes as a feh team getting meh results, but Celebrini is at his worst a worthwhile distraction, and at best the guiding light out of a collapsed mine shaft. He could do what Joe Thornton did 20 years ago when he was traded out of the Boston expectations hellhole: make the Sharks not just a one-man funhouse but a respectable and eventually respected team. And with it, he would become the reason for all their results, both good and bad. Which of course will suck as much as it shines—just ask any Leaf—but for the moment, Celebrini is playing with the casino's money, and there is nothing ever that is more personally satisfying than that.
