It has been 2,500 days, give or take a week, since the San Jose Sharks last played a truly meaningful hockey game. That game was a series-ending 5-1 loss to St. Louis in the 2019 Western Conference Finals, and since then, the Sharks have been the worst team in the league both by record and, justifiably enough, by attendance. Whatever else you may think of Sharks fans, which we accept is essentially nothing one way or another, they are discerning.
So the team has come up with a couple of shameless gimmicks to juice the house. The first was to invent an AI character named “Macklin Celebrini” to electrify and entertain on a nearly nightly basis, and when that seemed to hit a wall, they added a new twist to the Celebrini (which is the trendiest new aperitif order at your tonier bistros) by waiting until the last minute to score a game-winning goal.
The Sharks trotted that move out in Columbus last Saturday, with a goal from Igor Chernyshov with 95 seconds left to beat the confounding Blue Jackets, 3-2, in Ohio. But this innovation needed to be tested at home before their own customers to see if it would work there as well, and so Monday night the Sharks beat St. Louis, 5-4, thanks to an Adam Gaudette goal with 22 seconds to play. But that was before their first non-sellout crowd since early January, and so they tried it again last night against Anaheim with an added boost—they used a Celebrini goal with 1:39 left to tie the game (his 40th) and then an Alexander Wennberg goal with 31 seconds to play to win it, assisted of course by the Teal Refresher himself. This is the first time in NHL history that a team has won three consecutive games with a goal in the last two minutes of regulation, and serves as irrefutable testimony that the Sharks will try nearly any ridiculous idea to avoid wasting any more of the Celebrini they have in stock.
And so the Sharks have combined their two most recent marketing gags to haul themselves back into the shade of the low-hanging fruit tree that is the Western Conference postseason picture, and are now only a point behind eighth-place Los Angeles with a game in hand. Since San Jose’s last four seasons have seen them 13, 31, 45, and 41 points out of a playoff spot on this day, this can be considered progress.
The Celebrini Experience has been going on for two years now, and at this point he is considered the most entertaining thing in all of hockey. Fans in almost every other market root for the Sharks almost as hard as they do their own team just because of him, and every fan base in Canada stops hating its own team long enough to pay attention to him. That winning-fans-in-Vancouver-because-their-own-team-is-such-a-disaster gambit, though, is a deeply niche market. You basically need Macklin Celebrini to make it work, but the Sharks are the only team that has him.
San Jose had been road-testing a similar gambit for much of this season, by waiting until overtime for most of their wins and hoping Celebrini could vamp until then. That didn’t work well enough often enough, so they shipped the prototype to Milan to see if the Olympics could boost the concept; this worked until Celebrini, on loan to Canada, ended up on the losing team in the gold medal game. In other words, he did great, but the patient still died.
Upon his return, the Sharks lost the plot and also 10 of 15 games, including three overtime losses, thus blowing the extra-time heroics part of the plan. The only thing really keeping them in the race at all was the fact that the rest of the division remained as it has been all year: a perpetually exploding trash heap.
So in desperation, and seeing how close they were to Calgary, that was plenty of desperation by itself, San Jose settled on yet another new plan: double down on the Celebrini and score-late-in-regulation plan. He has five goals and four assists in the last three games, including helpers on the game-winners against Columbus and St. Louis. On the year, the Sharks are 24-5-2 when he scores a goal, and 1-15-3 when he doesn’t score at all. Those two trends seem rather preposterously sustainable.
Which is more than can be said for the wait-until-the-last-minute-to-save-their-sorry-asses hijinks they are trying out now. Eventually the Sharks will have to figure out either a new and even weirder twist on their gimmick, or try more orthodox ways of giving both nations what they seem to want—Macklin Celebrini, in the playoffs. They play Toronto tonight, so anything ab-, para- or even merely anti-normal is in play. Desperation tinged with absurdity is its own genre, after all, and the Sharks are properly desperate while the Leafs are simply absurd.
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