Celebrini missed two games with a lower-body injury, and his value to the Sharks was noticeable in his absence against the Dallas Stars on Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He had five assists in San Jose’s first two games and the Sharks won both in overtime against the Florida Panthers and Los Angeles Kings. The Sharks managed 13 shots on goal in a 5-0 loss without him in Dallas.<\/p>\n
They won 3-2 in overtime against the St. Louis Blues on Thursday without Celebrini, who returned to score a goal in a 3-1 loss to the Edmonton Oilers in San Jose on Saturday.<\/p>\n
“We just couldn’t get any traction,” Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky said after the game against the Stars.<\/p>\n
Celebrini’s grip is the biggest reason why the Sharks are one of the fastest-rising teams in the League.<\/p>\n
They finished last season with 86 points, a 34-point improvement from Celebrini’s rookie season of 2024-25, when he had 63 points (25 goals, 38 assists) in 73 games. The Sharks missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs by four points last season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They’re expected to make it this season, provided Celebrini doesn’t miss too much time.<\/p>\n
Celebrini’s rise to superstardom and the Sharks’ climb up the NHL standings is comparable to what the Pittsburgh Penguins experienced in Sidney Crosby’s early years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Penguins finished second to last with 58 points in Crosby’s rookie season of 2005-06 despite the fact that he had 102 points (39 goals, 63 assists) in 81 games.<\/p>\n
They made the playoffs in Crosby’s second season, when he won the Hart Trophy and the Art Ross Trophy, finishing with 120 points (36 goals, 84 assists).<\/p>\n
The Penguins reached the Stanley Cup Final in Crosby’s third season (2007-08) and won the Stanley Cup in his fourth (2008-09).<\/p>\n
The Sharks are a step behind having missed the playoffs in Celebrini’s second season, but their turnaround last season seems to be a sign that there are much bigger things to come, with Celebrini the most valuable part of the rise.<\/p>\n
“Being on a team that was pretty poor when he got there and being able to turn that around; I don’t know if anyone’s ever going to be Sidney Crosby, but it was very Crosby-esque in my brain,” Seattle Kraken forward Matty Beniers<\/a> said. “I mean, those guys are all excellent.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Celebrini missed two games with a lower-body injury, and his value to the Sharks was noticeable in his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":930105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-930104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}