OAKVILLE, ONT — Macklin Celebrini’s first few sessions at Canada’s World Junior Championship selection camp were absolutely fine. But it wasn’t until the final event of the four-day gathering that he showed something that truly screamed “first overall.”
In the opening period of the second and final game versus a U SPORTS all-star team brought in to put the world junior hopefuls through their paces, Celebrini was everywhere. Five minutes into the contest, he started and finished a beautiful give-and-go with Jordan Dumais. That wound up being Canada’s only goal of the contest, but only because the two or three times Celebrini put the puck on a tee for a teammate it wasn’t converted. It was precisely the kind of performance that reminded you who this kid is and can yet become.
Later that mid-December day, Celebrini was officially tabbed to be one of the guys representing Canada at the 2024 WJC in Sweden. When the news was official, he and his new beaming teammates returned from their hotel to the Sixteen Mile Sports Complex in Oakville, Ont., to be introduced to a crowd of adoring fans. Not long after that, Peter Anholt — the lead member of Hockey Canada’s management group for this event — gushed about the only 2006-born and 2024 NHL Draft-eligible player on Canada’s roster: “Special,” he said of Celebrini. “Special player in a lot of ways. [He] can move around the lineup in a lot of different ways, different positions. We’re really excited about that player.”
About seven months from now, some lucky NHL suit will be speaking about Celebrini in the same glowing terms. The Boston University centre — who lives with his brother, fellow Terrier Aiden Celebrini — is doing remarkable things in his freshman NCAA season and is poised to follow in the footsteps of another Vancouver boy, Connor Bedard, by going first overall in the draft. Of course, Celebrini is also hoping to follow Bedard’s lead by winning a gold medal with Canada at a tourney he’s been dreaming of playing in since forever. He’ll be one of — if not the — most closely monitored players at the event that officially kicks off on Boxing Day in Gothenburg. And while conversations and comparisons fill the air around him, Celebrini will surely remain the same do-it-all, dialed-in player who’s only ever been concerned with winning and ways to get better. “You just stay focused,” he said early on at selection camp of how he handles the growing hoopla around him. “It’s all talk; nothing really matters until it happens.”
MIKE GARMAN AND the rest of the Chicago Steel coaching staff, as you’d expect, like to keep tabs on alumni of their club. Because they’re in the Central Time zone, Garman and the crew can often flick on a screen before one of their own United States Hockey League games to catch an hour or so of the guys playing college hockey on the east coast. “Watching him this year, we almost laugh,” Garman says of Celebrini. “He gets on the ice and all of a sudden scoring chances just start happening. I don’t know how it is as an underage in college hockey you just jump on and start creating scoring chances. It shouldn’t be that easy, but it’s pretty amazing watching him play.”
Matthew Wood agrees. The University of Connecticut sophomore winger recalls playing against Celebrini at tournaments when they were both AAA youth hockey players and the latter would just wreck games. It’s not that different now, with both guys competing in the Hockey East conference. “He’s really special player,” says Wood, Celebrini’s Team Canada teammate and roommate at selection camp. “He’s doing amazing things, especially at Boston University.”
Bear in mind Celebrini’s 10 goals and 25 points in 15 games with BU come on the heels of major off-season shoulder surgery. He actually sustained the injury early in his time with Garman and the Steel, but played through it to produce an incredible 46 goals in 50 USHL contests during the 2022-23 campaign, to say nothing of the 15 points in seven outings he recorded for Canada — as its youngest player — at last spring’s U-18 World Championship.
The Steel are no strangers to acclaimed prospects. Owen Power, the top pick in the 2020 NHL Draft, spent two winters with them in Chicago. Right before Celebrini arrived, a kid who might have gone first overall in a non-Bedard draft was also putting his skills on display with the squad.
“I had Adam Fantilli [in 2020-21 and 2021-22] and he, obviously, is a very good player,” Garman, the Steel’s coach and general manager, says. “And what Macklin was doing was so far beyond [even that], just production-wise.”
That Celebrini is a fantastic player didn’t exactly catch Garman off-guard. But the signs he had everything else in place started to show up pretty quickly, too. It began when Celebrini, then at Minnesota-based prep school Shattuck-St. Mary’s, first came with his father, Rick, to visit the Steel. Rick was certainly well-positioned to take the lead in terms on behalf of his then-15-year-old son’s sports future. The senior Celebrini is the director of sports medicine and performance for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, having previously worked with the Vancouver Canucks and several Canadian Olympians. The injury rehabilitation Macklin did last summer was guided by Dr. Dad. Still, Garman couldn’t help but notice not just the fact that Macklin guided the discussion himself, but where he took it.
“It was very clear that there was no ego, there was no entitlement,” Garman says. “At no point did he ever ask me if he was getting on the power play or what minutes he was going to play or anything [like that]. He was just more, ‘Hey, what do you guys do for development? How much can I skate? How much can I work with the coaches? What’s the style of play?’ It was much more what I felt like were really quality questions.”
Once Celebrini officially arrived, Garman’s opinion of him as a player and person only grew. Even something like the way the six-foot, 190-pounder navigated the ice jumped off the page.
“I don’t really know how to explain it and some of the credit might be to his dad; I consider him just an incredible mover,” Garman says. “The way his body moves, the way he can change direction, the amount of strength that he has in unbalanced situations, the way he can change direction and accelerate and decelerate. I actually think he’s one of the best movers I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The old-fashioned straight-line speed was also hard to miss, especially when applied in a scenario that didn’t necessarily call for it. Garman recalled a game in the early portion of the season when Chicago was visiting Green Bay, and in the final stages of dusting the Gamblers by five or six goals. Celebrini — sitting on a handful of points in the game — took a late penalty. When he exited the box, there was a Green Bay player on a breakaway and only seconds left on the clock. Unwilling to just let things play out, Celebrini blasted down the full sheet and negated the chance.
Garman also remembers sitting with the coaches after an early-season Saturday home game, the second contest for the Steel in 24 hours. “Our team gym is basically directly above our coaches’ offices in the player area, and we hear the weights being slammed at, like, 10 p.m.,” Garman says. “Mack is up there with [a couple teammates] and they’re getting, like, a heavy lift in. And then the next weekend, all of a sudden you got 12, 13 guys up there. His year with us, in a lot of ways [he] drove the culture and the work ethic of our team and not by anything he said, just by how he worked.”
It’s that total-package aspect to Celebrini’s game and approach that leads Garman to a comparison he does not make flippantly. “Macklin is a very unique player, like a [Sidney] Crosby. And I know we don’t want to just throw that one around willy-nilly, but he’s just exceptional at everything,” the former NCAA and minor-pro goalie says. “There’s not one thing I would [point to] like, ‘Oh, that’s his game.’ I felt like if he had no talent — if he didn’t produce any points for us — he still would have been an incredibly valuable player.”
Of course, what makes Celebrini so rare is he’s going to bring loads of production in addition to those intangibles — just like the guys he was influenced by. “Like anyone, you watch the best players in the world,” he says. “I grew up watching Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron, Jonathan Toews: 200-foot guys, really responsible in their defensive zone, but also powerhouses in the offensive zone.”
All of those guys won world junior gold with Canada. Now, Celebrini gets to show an entire country why he could someday be in their class. “I always thought about [playing at the WJC], but it didn’t really hit me until I got the call that I was coming [to camp],” he says. “As a kid, you dream about playing this tournament and getting this opportunity.”
Bet your life he’s tackling this one with the same tenacity as every opportunity that’s come before.
