Macklin Celebrini joins legendary NHL company as Sharks win fourth straight game originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
The ice is cold but the Sharks skating on it are scorching hot.
San Jose extended its win streak to four games with a thrilling 2-1 overtime win over the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday night at Grand Casino Arena. It’s the first time in over four years the Sharks have won four consecutive games.
Macklin Celebrini continued his rapid rise to superstardom, assisting both Sharks goals while joining a pair of NHL legends in elite historical company.
The 19-year-old’s 26 points this season are tied with Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby’s 2006-07 campaign for the second-most ever by a teenager through their team’s first 17 games, trailing only Wayne Gretzky’s 27 in 1980-81. (h/t The Associated Press’ Josh Dubow)
Both Crosby and Gretzky took home the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player for those campaigns, a conversation Celebrini currently finds himself squarely entrenched in during his sophomore season.
Celebrini’s first apple of the night tied things at 1-1 at 11:57 in the third period, with a perfectly placed pass across the face of the net to fellow young phenom Will Smith.
Two weeks ago, Celebrini delivered the overtime winner with a spectacular goal to secure victory over the Wild in Minnesota. On Tuesday, he set up teammate Collin Graf with the honor, dishing a pass between the legs of Wild defenseman Jonas Brodin.
“Just came out there and the puck sort of got to Mack, Just skated at the net with my stick on the ice and I knew he’d be able to find me,” Graf told reporters after Tuesday’s win. “Once I got it, I just tried making a quick play and was fortunate enough to get one.”
The Sharks have won six of their last seven games, with San Jose’s only loss coming in a 3-2 shootout defeat to the Detroit Red Wings on Nov. 2. They are outscoring opponents by a whopping 24-10 margin over that span.
While the Sharks’ recent offensive output has been nothing short of outstanding, the team’s contributions in the defensive zone can’t be ignored. San Jose has only allowed one goal in each of its last four games, a far cry from the beginning of the season when the Sharks conceded multiple scores in each of their first 13 contests.
Goaltender Yaroslav Askarov continued his incredible November with another heroic effort in net, stopping 28 of the Wild’s 29 shots after getting slotted in as a last-minute replacement for scheduled starter Alex Nedeljkovic, who is tending to a personal matter, according to coach Ryan Warsofsky.
“It’s going to happen sometimes, you have to be ready,” Askarov told reporters after the victory.
Askarov is a perfect 4-0-0 this month with a .963 save percentage in four starts, displaying the immense potential that made him the NHL’s No. 1 goalie prospect.
The Sharks certainly appear to be firing on all cylinders at the moment, but coach Ryan Warsofsky isn’t going to get complacent amid San Jose’s win streak.
“We want to keep it going, that’s the biggest thing,” Warsofsky told reporters after Tuesday’s win. “We’re playing some pretty good hockey, even when we don’t have our best we’re finding ways to win, our goaltending has been great. We still got ways to get better, we still got to get better individually and collectively and that will be the message.
“But we got good confidence and we know we can win in different ways and I think that’s important in this league.”
Three weeks ago, the Sharks were winless through their first six games after a deflating 4-3 loss to the New York Islanders. After Tuesday, they own an NHL playoff spot after going 8-4-2 over their last 11 games. Yes, you read that right. A playoff spot.
We get it, it’s November. Pump the brakes on the postseason talk. But a stretch of play like this can’t be overlooked, particularly for a fanbase that spent the last five years stuck in the cellar patiently awaiting this franchise’s return to NHL glory.
The Sharks weren’t supposed to arrive this early. This always was going to be a long, arduous rebuild that left San Jose and its fans hungrily chasing the light at the end of the tunnel year after year. There were walls that would need to be climbed before anyone would take these Sharks seriously, and who knows how long that inevitably would take.
It looks like this team said the hell with climbing over those walls, and instead decided to plow right through them.
The Sharks are here, the Sharks are now. The future might be teal, but you better believe the present is too.
