SAN JOSE -- It didn’t take long for Macklin Celebrini to feel right at home Sunday.
The No. 1 pick in the 2024 NHL Draft by the San Jose Sharks had a goal and an assist in his first game at SAP Center, a 4-2 preseason loss to the Vegas Golden Knights.
“Right when [I] stepped on the ice, skating in the building for the first time, that was really cool,” Celebrini said. “It was pretty loud in there. I really enjoyed that.”
The 18-year-old center cut it to 3-1 with a power-play goal at 6:33 of the third period. He finished a give-and-go with Luca Cagnoni by firing a one-timer past Isaiah Saville from the right face-off circle.
“It was amazing,” Celebrini said. “… It was definitely loud, and you could hear the fans that were in the building. That was cool to hear.
"Any time you can get the defensive team running around, whether it's 5-on-5, 4-on-4, or 5-on-4, anytime you can get them running around and out of their structure, the better it is and more lanes open up. I feel like that's a goal for a lot of power plays.”
Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky was pleased with Celebrini's performance in their preseason opener but said he needs to improve on the defensive side. Celebrini joins the NHL after one season at Boston University, where he had 64 points (32 goals, 32 assists) in 38 games.
"He was good. He did some really good things with the puck,” Warsofsky said. “[There are] some things he needs to work on defensively, without the puck, the speed of the game for him. He scores a big goal [and] gets us momentum. He did some really good things offensively, for sure.
“You feel the energy in the building, the fans are getting excited. Obviously, he scores a big goal on the power play, and we’ve seen that goal [from him] quite a bit in college at BU. For sure, those are game-breaking moments. If you want to be a really, really good player, a superstar player in this league, those guys do those things. You look across the NHL, there’s those types of players, and I think he’s on his way to being one of those guys. But he obviously has some things to work on.”
Celebrini continued to dictate play on the man-advantage, assisting on Tyler Toffoli’s goal just 1:24 later. Celebrini got the puck in the right face-off circle, and he fired the puck through traffic to Toffoli for a tap-in at the left post at 7:57.
“He wants to be the guy. He wants to have the puck on his stick the whole game,” Toffoli said. “He doesn’t wait around for it to come to him. I think he does a real good job of being in really good spots and just knowing when to kill plays, strike and when he gets it -- [defensive] zone, [offensive] zone -- he gets his feet moving and he has possession of the puck.
"You saw tonight the things that he can do, not only scoring goals and the pass that he made to me, but I thought he did a really good job of staying low in the [defensive] zone and being really responsible. It's only one game, but he's been great all the way through camp so far."
It was Celebrini’s second game in a Sharks uniform; he scored in a 3-2 win against the Utah Hockey Club in the opener of the 2024 Rookie Faceoff on Sept. 13 in El Segundo, California. He did not play the remaining two games of the tournament.
San Jose plays its next of five more preseason games Tuesday here against the Anaheim Ducks. It opens the regular season at home against the St. Louis Blues on Oct. 10.
“It’s the first game of preseason, so it was kind of like the Rookie [Faceoff] -- a lot of stuff’s going on the first 10 minutes, 15 minutes,” Celebrini said. “As the game went on, I felt like us as a whole, we got a little more comfortable, a little more settled into our structure and felt like we got better.
“You’re never going to be perfect on the first try, especially with the type of structure we want to play. “I know I wasn’t good enough; I let a couple of opportunities through, so I feel like as we start playing more together, start reading off each other better, those things we’ll clean up.”
