SAN JOSE – A day after he completed his third career NHL hat trick with an overtime goal, etching his name alongside some of the NHL’s all-time greatest players, Sharks center Macklin Celebrini had already moved on.
Sitting just outside of a playoff spot, there’s too much left for the Sharks to try to accomplish, too much room for improvement with three-quarters of the season remaining.
“Obviously, you can never be disappointed with a win. When you get two points, it’s always a good thing,” Celebrini said Wednesday, less than 14 hours after his overtime goal lifted the Sharks to a 3-2 victory over the Utah Mammoth at SAP Center. “But I think the way we’re playing right now, we’re disconnected, and you’re not going to continue to win like this.”
Celebrini’s team-leading 13th goal of the year at the 2:52 mark of overtime Tuesday gave the Sharks their fifth win in seven games.
It also helped Celebrini become just the fourth teenager in NHL history to reach the 30-point mark in 20 or fewer games of a season, joining Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, and Sidney Crosby, who are first, eighth, and ninth, respectively, on the league’s all-time scoring list.
Going into Thursday’s game with the Los Angeles Kings, Celebrini’s 30 points represent the most for any Sharks player – regardless of age — through the first 20 games of the season.
“He’s special,” Sharks defenseman Vincent Desharnais said Tuesday. “I think everyone in here and everyone in this building kind of sees how special he is as a player, and as a human being as well.
“He always wants to get better every day. I’m sure next skate, he’s going to be one of the first guys on the ice to work on something else. It’s impressive to see, and it inspires everyone to want to follow him.”
Still, Celebrini and the Sharks (9-8-3) know that the way they played Tuesday, even as they ended a two-game slide, is not conducive to long-term success, as they made too many mistakes with the puck, leaving them on defense for too long rather than being on the attack.
The Sharks, per Natural Stat Trick, allowed 11 high-danger changes on Tuesday during 5-on-5 play — slightly more than the 9.55 they’ve averaged this season — and created only six.
“We didn’t give up a ton of 5-on-5 chances,” Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky said Wednesday. “But we gave a lot of almost chances.”
“It starts with our forecheck. That’s where we’ve had success. We’ve got to stop pucks up, we’ve got to get numbers around it. We want to have our (defensemen) gapped up. It should be a pretty clear picture, and we should see all five guys in that picture when we go back and watch it on video. So we just weren’t there enough last night.”
Celebrini scored at even-strength at the 1:47 and 5:58 marks of the first period, giving the Sharks an early 2-0 lead. But after a sloppy second period, the Sharks allowed two third-period goals to JJ Peterka, including the tying goal with 2:51 left in regulation, as his shot from 40 feet away got between goalie Yaroslav Askarov’s upper body and left arm to tie the game 2-2.
On his overtime power play goal, Celebrini took a pass from William Eklund, stickhandled the puck near the top of the circles, and fired a shot past Utah goalie Vitek Vanecek for his 13th goal of the season.
“Obviously, we get a fortunate power play, and we score on the 4-on-3,” Warsofsky said Wednesday. “To be honest, there were times in that game (last night) that looked like last year. So that’s something we have to fix, and we need to be better.
“We have to have maturity in our game. … We’re not playing that well, and we need to get it on the rails here quickly. There’s a lot of hockey ahead of us. We’re playing with fire. We’re making it extremely hard on ourselves to win hockey games.”
The Sharks gladly took Tuesday’s win but want to reestablish some of the connectivity that had led to a 6-0-1 streak from Oct. 30 to Nov. 11.
“We just need to get on the same page,” Celebrini said. “I think the understanding is it’s good that we’re finding ways to get points here and there, but it’s not good enough for the long haul.”
Celebrini’s first two goals on Tuesday represented the Sharks’ first goals during 5-on-5 play since Adam Gaudette scored in the second period of San Jose’s 3-1 win over the Florida Panthers on Nov. 8.
Now the Sharks have to get some more production from their power play, which is 4-for-37 over the last 11 games. They went 1-for-5 with the man advantage on Tuesday and missed an opportunity to take a 3-1 lead late in the third period after Utah took a delay of game penalty on an unsuccessful coach’s challenge after a disallowed Mammoth goal due to goalie interference.
“We did some (good) things that we’ve talked about. We just got to do it more consistently,” Warsofsky said. “It needs to be shift after shift after shift. When we get a power play, our mentality needs to be attack, and let’s go. Our guys are trying. It’s not like they go out there and say, ‘Hey, let’s just pass it around the outside, not create any shots.’ We’ve got to get everyone on the same page and get more connected.”