I have spent the better part of the last year wandering around Northern California looking like a man who has never seen a comb — the byproduct of raising a three-year-old and a 10-month-old who view my personal grooming habits as an infringement on their time.
Busy and broken, my scalp is permanently shielded by a rotation of NHL Original Six caps. Yesterday was the Canadiens; today, the Red Wings.
Naturally, this invites the kind of small talk usually reserved for weather reports. “Blackhawks any good?” “Is that the New York Rangers?”
And often, the next question is about the local outfit — the one that has spent the post-pandemic era as a glorified witness protection program for hockey players.
“So, how are the Sharks doing?”
That’s when I go into the routine:
“Oh, you mean the 2030 Stanley Cup Champion San Jose Sharks?”
It’s a lame bit I refuse to let die, despite years of overuse.
And here’s my problem:
Macklin Celebrini is operating on a different, accelerated schedule.
A Tuesday night game against the Calgary Flames should have been a non-event. The Flames are woeful; the Sharks are supposed to be “developing.”
Instead, we got a glimpse of the exceptionally bright future, again.
The Sharks did what a playoff team is supposed to do, and trounced Calgary early and late.
But this game was important because of what the man who will eventually lift that Stanley Cup did:
He somehow found another gear.
There’s a case to be made for the fact that 19-year-old Macklin Celebrini is the best player in the NHL today.
Not tomorrow, not in 2030 — today.
And no disrespect to Nathan McKinnon, Cale Makar, Connor McDavid, Kirill Kaprizov, and Nikita Kucherov, but the fact that someone who is two years away from being able to order a beer in the United States is on their level is patently absurd.
I did the hackey thing recently and compared Celebrini to Steph Curry. I advocated for him to be named the Sharks’ captain over the weekend after he sparked the Sharks’ best regular-season comeback in franchise history in Pittsburgh. Every game, he does something that puts him in a statistical category that only Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby inhabit.
There are not enough ways to hype up this kid. I can do it in every column, every KNBR show, every podcast, every radio hit, every conversation with someone about my silly hats, and it would still come up woefully short.
Celebrini was down his two wingers on Tuesday — Will Smith and Philipp Kurashev are both on injured reserve — he still turned in a two-goal, two-assist performance. He elevated not just his own play but also the play of the bottom-six players — one in his first NHL game — that were called up to the top line because, well, the Sharks knew Celebrini would find a way to make it work.
Did he ever.
Two plays stood out from his brilliant performance:
The first is the highlight-reel goal you have undoubtedly seen by now: Celebrini taking a pass from Colin Graf after a slow-developing zone entrance, opening up to convince $32 million defenseman Kevin Bahl he was going to pass it right back to Graf, and then WHOOP, spinning around like Christian McCaffrey to free himself of his marker(s) and slip towards the goal, going one-on-one with the exceptionally capable Dustin Wolf between the pipes.
Wolf made the initial save, but couldn’t control the puck, which bounced up and hit Celebrini in the hip, knocking it over the line.
It all happened in a flash — one impossible continuous motion.
“I have nothing to say,” the never short for words (or great insight) Drew Remenda said on the Sharks broadcast. “My gosh.”
I, however, woke the baby up by saying something a little more potent than “my gosh” as the play developed.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
(Didn’t think you were going to get a quote from him today, did you?)
Who thinks to go spin-o-rama in the middle of the ice, with a 6-foot-6 defenseman on top of him and Michael Backlund backchecking with gusto, closing in with speed?
Celebrini does.
And he really thinks nothing of it.
“It was kind of just reaction,” Celebrini said after the game. “It was a little bit lucky.”
Sure, let’s go with that. Humility is important.
But you know what wasn’t luck? A play that Celebrini made with a little more than 90 seconds remaining in the third period of that game, with the Flames’ net empty.
Celebrini, on the ice because the Sharks’ coaching staff trusts him to play a strong defensive game, saw the puck bounce around the San Jose defensive zone and back towards center ice.
And as Flames defenseman Rasmus Andersson went to retrieve it, Celebrini dove, face-first into the ice, and with full extension of his stick was able to hit the puck before Andersson reached it, pushing it into the Flames’ defensive zone and allowing the Sharks’ defense — down a man — to set up for Calgary’s last-second barrage.
It’s the kind of play that will never show up in the highlight package, but it speaks volumes about how good Celebrini is.
And because of that play, 15 seconds later, after the Sharks won a board battle behind their net, Celebrini chased down another puck in the neutral zone. No one was in front of him and he skated the puck into the net for the nail-in-the-coffin goal.
Pair all of this with the extra minutes Celebrini skated yesterday with Ty Dellandrea’s line after the center took a shot to the hand in this game, and you had a winning performance of the highest caliber.
And folks, he does stuff like this almost every single night.
He does the big stuff, he does the little stuff. Against men in their athletic primes, making tens of millions of dollars in the best hockey league in the world, he looks as if he is playing a different sport.
The chants in the SAP Center on Tuesday were unmistakable.
“M-V-P, M-V-P.”
They aren’t wrong.
And he’s just getting started.
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