San Jose Sharks captain Macklin Celebrini, 20, wants the Shark Tank rocking again

Macklin Celebrini was about to start seventh grade when he first met a Golden State Warrior. On a visit to the Bay Area before his family moved there, he and his brothers met Kevin Durant at the team’s facility.

“Man, to see somebody that tall? Kinda blew our minds,” Celebrini wrote in April in The Players’ Tribune. “I think I went up to his knee.”

Eight years later, the boy from North Vancouver, British Columbia, is 20 and the captain of the San Jose Sharks. On Sept. 25, former captain Joe Thornton handed him the jersey with the “C.” He is the 11th full-time captain in team history, the youngest the Sharks have ever had and the youngest active captain in the NHL.

“Just an amazing honor,” Celebrini said that day. “I just feel privileged to be able to wear this jersey and be the captain.”

A soccer family that raised hockey players

Celebrini was born June 13, 2006, one of four children of Rick and Robyn Celebrini. Both parents played soccer. Robyn played in college. Rick played in college, for Canada’s under-20 national team and professionally for the Vancouver 86ers, then became a sports physiotherapist who worked with Canada’s men’s alpine ski team at the 1994 and 2002 Winter Olympics and later with the Vancouver Whitecaps.

“They kind of were both shooting for one of us to play soccer but it didn’t turn out that way,” Celebrini said in 2023, laughing. The three boys, Aiden, Macklin and RJ, play hockey. Their sister, Charlie, plays tennis.

Macklin started skating at 3. The family lived at the top of Keith Road in North Vancouver, two minutes down the hill from the North Shore Winter Club, where he played his youth hockey. He was a Canucks fan. A night watching Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins was a childhood highlight.

“I grew up dreaming about the NHL,” he said as a college freshman. “Ever since I can remember, I loved laying on the couch and watching the Vancouver Canucks.”

The move to the Bay Area

In 2018, the Warriors hired Rick Celebrini as director of sports medicine and performance, and the family moved to the Bay Area. For a 12-year-old, it was “the coolest thing in the world,” Celebrini wrote, and also hard.

“It was a bit lonely for sure,” he wrote. “I missed my friends back home and the routine I had there.” Even the hockey felt different. “We leaned on each other because we were all we had for the most part.”

He found a team with the San Jose Jr. Sharks. In 2019-20 he scored 49 goals and 94 points in 54 games for their 14U AAA team. He also found heroes in the Warriors’ dynasty. “When Steph and Klay were on fire during those playoff runs, there was really nothing like it,” he wrote. “When a team gets on a run like that, you can really feel the energy change in the whole city. It lifts everybody up. I want that so bad here in San Jose.”

What he took most from the Warriors was how they took care of themselves. “They’re disciplined with their routines, with their bodies and with their minds,” he wrote of Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and the rest.

Shattuck, Chicago and Boston

Midway through his first year in California, the family visited Shattuck-St. Mary’s, the Minnesota boarding school that produced Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon. “It was pretty clear that it was the place to go,” he said. He and Aiden enrolled in 2020. At 14 he had 141 points in 50 games for the school’s 14U team. At 15, with the 18U prep team, he had 50 goals and 117 points in 52 games.

In 2022-23 he played for the Chicago Steel of the USHL, the top U.S. junior league. His 86 points set a league record. He became the second player ever named the USHL’s Player of the Year, Forward of the Year and Rookie of the Year in the same season. His coach, Mike Garman, called his work ethic “off the charts.”

One weekend that January, the Warriors were in Chicago to play the Bulls. Rick Celebrini got a suite at the Steel’s rink and brought some of the team along. “I think Coach Kerr was there, Draymond, a few others,” Celebrini wrote. “Even though it happened, I can’t even really picture them watching a USHL game.”

Then came Boston University, where he played alongside Aiden. As a 17-year-old freshman he scored 32 goals and 64 points in 38 games and became the first Hockey East player to average a goal a game in conference play. In April 2024 he won the Hobey Baker Award as the top player in college hockey, the youngest winner in its history.

“It’s surreal,” he said in his acceptance speech. “I’m shaking right now.” He used the rest of the speech to thank his coaches, teammates, athletic trainers and equipment staff.

He has always said his game starts on defense. “I’m a 200-foot player,” he said, meaning he plays the full length of the rink. “I take pride in my defence, but obviously everyone loves playing offence a little more.”

Living with Jumbo Joe

In June 2024 the Sharks drafted him first overall, the first time the team ever held the top pick. Thornton announced the pick on stage at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Celebrini calls it “an all-time moment for me.”

Thornton then became his landlord. For his first two NHL seasons, Celebrini lived with the Hall of Famer and his family. “Not a bad guy to have let you live with him when you get into the NHL,” he wrote. “It was incredibly kind of him to offer to have me for the year.” He scored 63 points that season and was a finalist for the Calder Trophy for the league’s top rookie.

Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Marc-Edouard Vlasic “really are Sharks hockey to me,” he wrote. He knows the team’s best years mostly from stories. For the 2016 Stanley Cup Final, he points out, “I was nine years old!”

A season for the record books

His second season was one of the best ever by a teenager. He scored 45 goals and 115 points, fourth in the league and a Sharks single-season record. Only Wayne Gretzky and Crosby have scored more points in a season as teenagers. He factored into 46.2% of the Sharks’ goals. The Sharks gained 34 standings points over the year before and finished four points out of a playoff spot.

He finished fourth in voting for the Hart Trophy, the league’s MVP award, and was a finalist for the Ted Lindsay Award, which the players vote on. In February, as the youngest player on Canada’s Olympic team in Milan, he led the tournament with five goals and finished second in scoring with 10 points. Canada lost the gold-medal game to the United States 2-1 in overtime. He later captained Canada at the world championship and was named its best forward. The International Ice Hockey Federation named him its Male Player of the Year.

The Olympic loss stayed with him. “It’s not easy losing the way we did in Italy,” he wrote. What helped, he wrote, was coming back to the Sharks’ locker room and the support of fans.

A contract built for the team

On July 29, Celebrini signed a five-year, $94 million extension that pays $18.8 million a year starting in 2027-28. At the time, it was the highest annual value in NHL history. He still signed for less than the maximum, he said, so the Sharks would have room to build around him.

“That was at the front of my mind throughout the whole negotiation,” he said. “I want to make sure that with where the cap was going, that the number made sense for the team first and foremost.”

General manager Mike Grier said his decision on the captaincy was cemented over the summer and in training camp. On draft night, Celebrini called the Sharks’ new first-round picks. He organized teammates to come back to San Jose early for training camp. “I’m comfortable with myself and how I lead,” Celebrini said in August. “I don’t think it would really change anything in the way I approach every day.”

Wiffle ball, golf and “The Office”

Away from the rink, Celebrini calls himself “pretty chill.” This season he and Smith, his best friend on the team, share a house in Los Gatos, GQ magazine reported in October. It is his first place without a host family. “His family was so great to me,” he said in August of the Thorntons. “I couldn’t be more grateful for them and having a home right when I got here.”

The new house has “a lot of sports in our backyard,” Celebrini told NBC Sports California in September. “Like a basketball hoop, we’ve got a volleyball net, soccer, baseball. We kind of got it all.” He plays Wiffle ball there with his friends, GQ reported. “I think we both kind of get bored easily,” he said, “so having someone to do something with I think keeps us busy.”

He golfs, too. At a team lunch, he joked with teammates about a recent golf trip to Pebble Beach and about his fantasy football picks, GQ reported. His favorite TV show is “The Office.” He loves Drake and country music, and he called the movie “The Odyssey” “unbelievable, maybe one of the best movies ever.”

At home, Smith does the baking, mostly healthy desserts made with dates. “He loves making these like healthy desserts,” Celebrini said. “I just let him do his thing.” Smith said Celebrini “makes really good chicken” but leaves cardboard boxes lying around. Their first squabble on record came on the drive to Sharks media day, when Celebrini wanted to follow his Maps app and Smith wanted Waze. They went Smith’s way. “And it was faster,” Smith said.

Sports run in the family. His parents “always wanted us to play every sport we could,” he told GQ. This year he also became the youngest athlete ever on the cover of EA Sports’ NHL video game series, on “NHL 27,” ESPN reported. The Sharks keep a PlayStation 5 in their locker room lounge, and players sometimes play after practice. “It’s pretty chill,” he said.

Cupcakes, costumes and a reading circle

Smith also teased him before a charity bake-off this fall. “I know Mack doesn’t do too much in the kitchen, so I’m not too worried about him,” Smith said. Celebrini’s team won the “Elevated Cupcake Experience” for the Sharks Foundation anyway.

On Oct. 30, Celebrini dressed as Mario, Smith as Luigi and S.J. Sharkie as Toad to visit young patients at Kaiser Permanente for Halloween. Last spring, he, Smith and forward Zack Ostapchuk led a reading circle at Bachrodt Elementary in San Jose. “I feel like we crushed it,” he wrote. “It was so much fun, and after the Olympics, it was the perfect reminder of what we’re doing this for.”

He had missed a Sharks Foundation arts day for pediatric cancer patients at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara before Christmas. “I couldn’t make it that day, and I was crushed,” he wrote. “I’m coming next time, guys!”

“When you really feel a part of a community, it means a lot more to wear the sweater,” he wrote. “And I love wearing this sweater.”

This season

Through Nov. 9, Celebrini had seven goals and 14 assists in 18 games, playing more than 23 minutes a night. The Sharks were 8-11-1 going into a game with the Penguins on Wednesday, Nov. 11. The team also added defensemen Darnell Nurse and Jacob Trouba and the No. 2 pick in the 2026 draft, Ivar Stenberg, who has been setting up and finishing plays with Celebrini.

His goal for the rest of it is simple. “We want the Shark Tank back,” he wrote. “We want it rocking. I know we can make some more Good Old Days. We gotta make it happen. Otherwise I’m gonna be hearing from Joe.”

Source: San Jose Sharks; NHL; The Players’ Tribune; Boston University; USHL; IIHF; Canadian Olympic Committee; Hockey-Reference.com; GQ; NBC Sports California; ESPN.