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The biggest victory in the past year for the San Jose Sharks hasn’t been on the ice. On May 7, 2024, the franchise won the NHL draft lottery after finishing its 2023–2024 season with the worst record in the league: 19-54-9. The run was dismal, but from that moment, spirits were incongruously high.
“The vibes around the franchise—that’s the word we’ve always used—just fundamentally changed,” Sharks president Jonathan Becher tells Front Office Sports. “Everything felt different.”
Macklin Celebrini flipped the switch.
San Jose has struggled since missing the playoffs only once between 2004 and 2019, a run that included an appearance in the 2016 Stanley Cup Final. Last season marked the third-fewest wins in franchise history. This season, the Sharks again sit in last place among the league’s 32 teams, and on March 16 were the first to be eliminated from the postseason. But rookie Celebrini, the league’s youngest active player, has ushered in hope for a fan base that needed something to cling to.
On June 28—just a couple of weeks after Celebrini’s 18th birthday—about 10,000 people gathered at the SAP Center to watch the Canadian-born forward become a Shark following one season at Boston University, where he was the youngest athlete to ever win the Hobey Baker Award for best college player. The Sharks, says Becher, expected a couple of thousand attendees max.
First-pick Celebrini already had ties to the Bay Area: His father, Rick, is VP of player health and performance with the Golden State Warriors; Celebrini also played for the Sharks’ U-14 AAA squad during the 2019–2020 season.
Jersey inquiries started pouring in the day after the draft. “He was still a college player, wasn’t a pro yet and wouldn’t be for a while,” says Becher. “We can’t sell his jersey. So, we’re like, ‘We can’t answer that. We’re still negotiating with the league. … We’ll call you back when we sort it out.”
Celebrini made an indelible mark on San Jose well before he even stepped into the locker room, and is already delivering as hoped: Despite missing about a month with an injury, the 18-year-old is top-two in a tight race to win the Calder Memorial Trophy, awarded to the league’s top rookie.
But he is only one piece of the 2024–2025 rookie puzzle that’s transformed the organization. “Macklin is the tip of the spear for us. This has been a youth campaign that’s been fueled by lots of rookies,” Becher says. “I don’t know if Macklin by himself would have nearly as much impact if we didn’t also have Will Smith as a rookie and Shakir Mukhamadullin and Collin Graf.”
Together, the cadre has been the spiritual antidote to the grim on-ice outcomes.
“For the season we’re having—obviously not the success that we want and the results that we want. But for the most part, we were able to keep a good vibe, a good feeling in the locker room,” Celebrini tells FOS. “It’s not the end of the world. We understand the position we’re in.”
With one of the youngest rosters in the NHL, San Jose believes “the future is teal.” While they’re waiting, the Sharks are having an enormous amount of fun—and proving not all losing is created equal.
At the vibes factory, “Willmack” has become the best-producing line.
Celebrini has made fast friends with 20-year-old center Smith, who played at rival Hockey East powerhouse Boston College. (“I hated playing against them,” Celebrini says of Smith as well as Graf, alum of the ECAC’s Quinnipiac; both were Hobey Baker finalists alongside Celebrini in 2024.) Celebrini and Smith—the fourth pick in the 2023 NHL draft who has delivered one of the best rookie performances since mid-January—are in many ways like any attached-at-the-hip Gen Zers posting videos on the internet.
But they also happen to be really, really good at hockey—and really, really good for their franchise. Willmack has pushed the Sharks discourse beyond its fans-only echo chamber and into an otherworldly parasocial dimension.
“People see these two kids, see our content with them, or [see] people talking about them and then get pulled into our universe,” says Laurel Young, the Sharks’ digital content coordinator, who works on the team’s social media presence. “For such an awful team these two are having the best time ever,” wrote one commenter on a Willmack TikTok.
“I didn’t think we would get along this well, and I think we just kind of rely on each other for different things throughout the year, with different pressures and expectations,” Celebrini tells FOS. He’s not sure why people have latched onto their friendship. “I think we’re just trying to have fun. We’re just trying to enjoy it.”
Every tracked social metric is pacing ahead of last season, despite San Jose’s identical standings position, according to Sharks data provided to FOS. Engagement ranks top five in the NHL since the start of the season.
The SAP Center is hardly at capacity, but Becher believes there’s a connection between the spike in audience and the sales for individual games. “We have more lookie-loos showing up to games this year than we ever had before, and I have to mostly attribute that to Mack,” he says.
Along with the highest season-ticket renewals since 2016, San Jose is also on pace to set a franchise record for number of individual game tickets sold and subsequent revenue.
Half were purchases from people who hadn’t bought within the past seven years, and the audience was more diverse than ever. “For our database purposes, they’re brand new,” he says, “and that shows the Macklin-plus-rookie effect that we’re reaching audiences that we’ve never reached before. … It’s been surprisingly easy for us to market this as a youth movement and for us to be hugely embraced.”
Within the Sharks circle, Celebrini is often mentioned in the same breath as franchise icon Joe Thornton, who played for San Jose from 2005 to 2020 and remains its boldest personality. Celebrini currently lives with Thornton and his family.
But it’s nearly impossible not to also draw wider comparisons to Connor Bedard, 2023’s first pick in the NHL entry draft, who took home last season’s Calder Trophy. Despite the Blackhawks’ abysmal 2023–2024 run—Chicago had the second-worst record after the Sharks—Bedard’s arrival was met with uncharacteristic fanfare and coverage.
In contrast, for as much buzz as Celebrini has generated locally, it’s not the same story across North America. West Coast puck-drop times are tough for visibility, and Becher belives fatigue around Bedard’s trumpeting has muted Celebrini’s volume, too. But Pete Blackburn, co-creator and host of the What Chaos! podcast, also says San Jose’s players aren’t under the same spotlight as Chicago’s. As one of the most important U.S. markets, Chicago has thrust unique pressure on Bedard to carry the slumping franchise.
Celebrini’s quieter entrance has an upside, Blackburn says: “Celebrini has been given more runway and wiggle room in San Jose than Bedard has been given in Chicago, where he’s always under the microscope. The vibes that are in San Jose right now, despite the team being so bad, are night and day with the Bedard situation.”
The gravitational pull from characters such as Celebrini can be good news for the NHL itself, which is increasingly leaning on its youngest stars as it turns its eyes to Gen Z and even Gen Alpha for growth.
“The league would be wise to lean in to that and to allow not only [Celebrini] but all of these players … to showcase that personality while also showcasing that they’re among the best hockey players in the world,” says Blackburn. “One player is not going to change everything for a team, but especially if you’re trying to grow the game, you need players that people can relate to and latch on to. I think players sell the game just about more than anything.”
Celebrini knows carrying a torch for the NHL will be part of his role. “I don’t think it’s a burden,” he says. “I think it’s just something that I understand just kind of comes with the territory and the business of where I’m at.”
There’s young blood in the water in San Jose, but the arrival of these rookies is hardly a “snap-of-the-finger fix,” says Blackburn.
“We talk a lot about the vibes and the goofiness of how much fun they’re having there. The thing that I think about is, how do you build around what they have right now in the early stages?” he says. “They all jell. They seem like they really, really like each other. And you know that it’s not going to work this year, but it definitely feels like the start of something.”
For now, the energy is a good foundation—and the team is currently positioned for another early pick in the 2025 draft to add to its youth core. “With the excitement around our rookies and our team and what we’re building,” Celebrini says, “we’re just looking forward to what can be.”
