When Macklin Celebrini attended Canada’s Olympic orientation camp in August, he said that he didn’t even know when the roster for the Milan-Cortina Games was due to be selected. And when Doug Armstrong and Scott Salmond phoned the 19-year-old on Wednesday morning to formally extend an invitation to join Team Canada, Celebrini missed the first call.
Armstrong, the Canadian GM, let out a chuckle when they eventually connected on a follow-up attempt before deadpanning: “Sorry, I called you a little earlier and you didn’t pick up, so we called someone else to see if they wanted to go to the Olympics.”
That was a call no one in Celebrini’s shoes had ever taken before.
It put him in position to become the first teenager to represent Canada in men’s hockey in an Olympics featuring NHL players. Decision-makers have been notoriously reluctant to trust someone so young on that stage. Team Canada famously left an 18-year-old Sidney Crosby off the 2006 Olympic roster in what became a 102-point season for the rookie sensation, only to see its offense run dry with three shutout losses and a quarterfinal exit.
Steve Yzerman was rewarded with a golden effort four years later when he recognized the need to skew younger with his roster selections — bringing 20-year-old Drew Doughty and 21-year-old Jonathan Toews to the 2010 Olympic tournament in Vancouver — but he still also left off 19-year-old Steven Stamkos amid what became a 51-goal campaign.
Even as Celebrini prepares to break new ground with the latest iteration of Team Canada, he’s doing so with 18-year-old Matthew Schaeffer and 20-year-old Connor Bedard being left at home in the middle of breakout seasons, in favor of options perceived as safer.
What all of that history hammers home is just how special Celebrini’s accomplishment is. He has had just 110 NHL games, plus another eight at last year’s IIHF World Hockey Championship, to build a body of work that Armstrong’s staff selected over perennial All-Stars and past Stanley Cup champions.
By early December, he’d left no doubt that he belonged in Milan.
“He’s taken the league by storm,” Toews told The Athletic of Celebrini. “What he’s doing, I’m sure it’s no coincidence.”
Before he became a three-time Stanley Cup champion widely known as “Captain Serious,” Toews made a habit of challenging the notions of what a young player could accomplish. After a college season at North Dakota, he accepted an invite from Hockey Canada to the 2007 IIHF World Hockey Championship to effectively serve as an extra forward. He wound up becoming a key member of a team full of NHLers that claimed gold. Then he added the Olympic gold and his first Stanley Cup just months apart in 2010, joining the prestigious IIHF Triple Gold Club before his entry-level contract had even expired.
Reflecting on that Vancouver Olympic experience and what it might be like for a teenager to step into a dressing room full of players he’s recently idolized, Toews pointed out that Celebrini should actually feel at ease.
“You’re out there with incredible players,” he said. “Obviously, there’s nerves and you’re trying to just settle in and relax and make plays. Not be too jumpy or anxious or anything like that. At the same time, you know you’re out there with the best players in the world, so you can make a mistake and be out of position — whatever it is, someone’s going to cover for you.
“I love the guys I played with. I think I played a handful of games with Mike Richards and Rick Nash, and Brenden Morrow and Patrice Bergeron — how can you go wrong? It was fun to kind of be in that checking role: We weren’t really relied upon for offense, and it just kind of seemed to happen for us the more we played the right way.
“It was kind of fun to go out there and score some big goals as a line for our team.”
Away from the ice, Doughty remembers tiptoeing into his first Olympic experience.
A gregarious personality and big locker-room presence, he was careful not to draw much attention when he got to Vancouver. That started to change after Crosby called him over to share a bus ride and ice-breaking conversation early in the tournament. It was the kind of welcoming gesture you can imagine Doughty paying forward to Celebrini in Italy next month.
His advice?
“Just enjoy the moment, play free,” Doughty said. “And I know he can do that.
“I was nervous going in. I was kind of just (looking) around, playing with guys I grew up watching and was amazed by and looked up to. So I didn’t say a ton at that time. Then, as I got more comfortable and started playing a little more minutes, I kind of turned into myself.”
One thing that should give Celebrini a leg up is how quickly he won over Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon while playing together at last year’s World Championship. That even resulted in an invitation to visit them in Nova Scotia for training sessions over the summer.
Very few teenagers have had access to that level of preparation for an NHL season, and Celebrini credits those guys for helping fuel the explosive progression in his game. He sits third in league scoring this season, trailing only MacKinnon and Connor McDavid.
“I mean, those are two of the best players in the world,” Celebrini told reporters in San Jose this week. “Sid’s probably one of the greatest ever, and Nate’s on his way. Being around those guys at World Championship and obviously a little bit over the summer, you can’t not soak up all of the little details and the stuff that they do. Also, how they approach every day.
“They love doing what they do, and I don’t think they’d be in the position they are without doing that. Watching them, being around them, they can’t not rub off on you.”
When push came to shove, there wasn’t much debate about Celebrini’s Olympic candidacy among Team Canada’s management group. He was identified as one of the 12 forwards considered a lock coming out of three days of meetings during the second week of December. He had at least a point in all nine games played after that, just for good measure.
Only a year earlier, Armstrong had met Celebrini for the first time. Armstrong made the introduction prior to a game against his St. Louis Blues and mentioned to Celebrini that he would be watched closely before the Milan Cortina Olympics. Then he went out and had three points during a 4-3 Sharks win over the Blues.
“I’ll always have those conversations after the game moving forward,” Armstrong said.
Celebrini has almost singlehandedly dragged the Sharks out of the NHL basement this season. He’s had a hand in exactly 50 percent of their total goals through 40 games and is plus-13 on a team with a minus-15 goal differential. There’s no chance they’d be hanging around the Western Conference wild-card race without him.
“I’m actually shocked at how good he already is both ways,” Doughty said. “That’s the one thing about him: Yeah, he puts up a ton of points, but he plays defensively, too.”
Said Crosby: “He had an incredible start and earned his way onto the team.”
Macklin Celebrini and Sidney Crosby bonded at the World Championship last year. (Michael Campanella / Getty Images)
When Celebrini officially got word he was headed to Italy, the first thing he did was call his parents, Rick and Robyn.
The moment was such a blur that he had trouble recalling exactly what was said during the conversation with Armstrong and Salmond, which barely lasted a minute.
“It’s all surreal, and I’m just really excited,” Celebrini said.
However, as Toews pointed out, it was neither a fluke nor an accident.
Stories about how diligently the next generation of NHL stars are training have already started making their way around the league. Toews has heard about the lengths to which Celebrini and Bedard are pushing themselves in order to take their place among the game’s best.
“The amount of time these guys spend on the ice in the summer, committed to their craft, committed to the game, it’s no surprise they’re playing at the level they are,” Toews said. “He’s not even 20 years old. It’s pretty cool to see.
“I’m sure he’ll do a hell of a job representing Canada at that level.”
— Eric Stephens contributed to this story.