Macklin Celebrini Is the NHL’s Next Big Breakout Star—Whether You Care About Hockey or Not

Macklin Celebrini’s Range Rover is missing.The 20-year-old Vancouver-born hockey phenom—a center on the San Jose Sharks—is standing in the players’ lounge of Tech CU Arena, the complex where the team trains. He has been in the building for almost 10 hours; morning practice, lunch, and then a photo shoot for this story.Now, he’s changed back into a pair of Lululemon shorts, a stretchy hoodie, and off-white Reebok Club C 85s. Celebrini was supposed to use said Land Rover to drive me to a Mexican restaurant in the nearby town of Los Gatos, where he and fellow player Will Smith, a Sharks forward and his best friend on the team, are sharing a house this season. “Oh yeah,” he says, leaning against a chair as we’re preparing to depart. “I forgot. My roommate took it.”Celebrini is an undeniable hockey prodigy with superlative potential. He is the second-highest-paid NHL athlete in history by average annual value, with a new five-year contract priced at $18.8 million per season. And he’s quickly become the ultra-marketable face of his sport’s next wave. (Literally. He’s on the cover of the latest edition of the video game EA Sports NHL 27.) In effect: He’s the promised prince of a multibillion dollar, 108-year-old sporting tradition. But in this moment, as we hustle out of the arena to catch an Uber, he’s just a young guy at the end of a long day. Celebrini is “starving,” he’s thumbing through his phone, and he’s breezy enough to have lent his roommate his car when he actually really needed it himself. Promptly, though, his star power comes back into focus: At the exit, a middle-aged guy asks for a selfie. Celebrini obliges politely, but his soft-spoken “Yeah, sure” and half-smile make me think he’s gone through this ritual a couple thousand times already.Celebrini is one of the best young players to arrive in years. Pundits speak of a “Macklin magic” with a palpable awe; he has an extraordinary understanding of hockey and can be intense about the sport. Yet Celebrini insists he’s “pretty chill” away from the ice and seeks the basic freedom most 20-year-olds are allowed: nothing too high-stakes, nothing too public, and nothing too serious. Earlier at lunch, he bantered with teammates about his fantasy football picks and a recent Pebble Beach golf trip. And online, he has a reputation as a jokester, especially when Smith is around.Celebrini also possesses heartthrob looks: a strong, square jawline, striking honey-olive eyes, and auburn hair that grows past his ears, which he often pushes back with both hands during press conferences and as we chat. He appears, essentially, like he could have been cast in Heated Rivalry or Off Campus—the ultra-popular romance shows that have recently used the world of hockey as a backdrop for steamy love stories. As his profile has risen, he has become an unwitting target of intrigue, fascination, and parasocial projection among those series’ many (mostly female) viewers, who are eager to find examples of, or at least hopeful stand-ins for, their fictional fantasies in the real world.It’s an unexpected—or at least ancillary—form of attention, one that he’s still getting used to. “There’s been times where it’s a little much,” Celebrini admits when asked if fans have behaved out of bounds. He says he gets the occasional crazy DM. “But I think you’ve got to just always obviously be calm and kind of just handle whatever gets thrown at you.”And so, when we meet in August, Celebrini is at a unique juncture: Few NHL players are landing magazine covers, making news with high-profile brand deals, and inspiring hundreds of fan fiction stories on Wattpad. Not long after our meeting, he’s named the Sharks’ captain—the youngest in the franchise’s history. All of it underscores his appeal with both hockey aficionados and the public at large. Celebrini may very well be the next big household hockey name since Wayne Gretzky. But first, he’s learning how to be the first hockey player ever to navigate such an unexpected burst of social media stardom.Celebrini, the second eldest of four, was destined to be an athlete before he really even knew what that meant. His mother, Robyn, was her soccer team’s captain in university, and his father, Rick, played professional soccer in Canada. “My parents always wanted us to play every sport we could,” says Celebrini, now in the back seat of the Uber as the setting sun washes San Jose’s streets in blue shadows. At age three, Celebrini began playing at the North Shore Winter Club in North Vancouver—he would train and compete there for nearly a decade. In a 2024 story in The Athletic, Robyn described him as “a little wild man” who shared his father’s “intensity” and “competitiveness.” Involving him in league sports, she said, was their way of “trying to find healthy outlets for his energy.”Rick was hired in 2018 by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors as the team’s director of sports medicine and performance. The family moved to San Jose that same year, and at 12, Celebrini was immersed in the rhythms of the elite professional sports world. Despite his dad’s proximity to basketball, Celebrini says he knew, all along, that “hockey was it.” “I loved it then as much as I do now,” he says. “It’d be hard to do something this much if you didn’t.”Propelled by that passion, Celebrini moved in 2020 to Faribault, Minnesota, to attend a school called Shattuck-St. Mary’s. The academy has a renowned hockey-development program for women and men—NHL standouts like Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon are alumni—and Celebrini spent two years boarding there. I ask him what he took away from that era of his training. “I learned how to do laundry there,” he says, quickly and with a grin.Chores aside, Shattuck taught Celebrini to self-motivate on the ice. It was where his signature skills—agile and powerful bursts, frequent shot taking, and an intrinsic understanding of the game’s quickfire transitions—came into focus. He left Shattuck with a combined 258 points (goals and assists), but what he remembers most is the extra work he put in. “I was skating as much as possible and doing everything I could to get better,” he says. “We practiced in the mornings, but if there was optional ice at the end of the day, I’d take that too.”Not much has changed. Sharks personnel, NHL executives, and his agent all tell me Celebrini is constantly on the ice honing his skills. “Macklin is always willing to do battle and do the little things to win pucks,” says Crosby in an email. He also has an instinct for scoring goals. Take a memorable play he made against the Winnipeg Jets last year. He was on a breakaway but decided not to take a shot from farther out. Instead, he slid past the goalie and pushed the puck into the net with the convex side of his blade, body twisting with near balletic torque. It’s one of the hundreds of highlight reel moments that make his skill evident.After Minnesota, Celebrini spent a season honing his skills in the American junior hockey league before landing at Boston University for the 2023–24 academic year, playing for the school’s Division I team. There, the discipline he’d learned at an early age informed his reputation. “Forget the talent…the work ethic is off the charts,” Celebrini’s BU coach, Jay Pandolfo, told the The Boston Globe in 2024. “He never takes a drill off. He never takes a rep off. It’s a big reason why he is who he is.”It was around then that Celebrini first encountered his now roommate and teammate Smith. Smith was a freshman at Boston College—a hockey foe of BU’s—playing forward. The duo’s rivalry on the ice was initially…heated. Celebrini jokingly said he “hated” Smith in a social media clip that circulated at the time because of the schools’ century-old feud. BC won three of four games against BU, but it was Celebrini who took the season’s Hobey Baker Memorial Award, an accolade given to college hockey’s best player. He was just 17—the youngest ever to receive it.In June 2024, Celebrini finally made his jump to professional hockey. He was selected by the Sharks as the NHL’s first overall draft pick—a by-chance Bay Area homecoming, which delighted his parents. After being benched with a hip injury in that rookie season, he returned in November, flexing his agility and delivering on his shot-making promise by leading the team in goals scored. The Sharks finished terribly, with a 20-50-12 record, but the energy of the team’s young roster was clear. Celebrini spearheaded the frisson; he’d often smile big and embrace his teammates after scoring. In one game against the Detroit Red Wings, he was so happy after ricocheting a puck into the net’s far outer edge that he all but flung himself into the sideboards. “We were the worst team in the league,” he says with that signature smile. “We had no business enjoying ourselves as much as we did.”The following season was much better—the Sharks missed their spot in the Stanley Cup playoffs by just four points—and it also had an unusual interruption. For the first time in 12 years, NHL players were allowed back at the Olympics. Celebrini was selected to play on Team Canada alongside Crosby, MacKinnon, Connor McDavid, and Cale Makar (the only other NHL player currently paid more than Celebrini, with a deal valued at $20.4 million per season). The powerhouse team fell just short of glory, taking silver in an overtime loss to the US. Celebrini was, according to an interview with his dad, “inconsolable” after the defeat. In a recent Hollywood Reporter story, he told the actor Belmont Cameli (who plays a hunky hockey nepo baby in Off Campus): “I can’t really let it eat at me.” But he concedes something different in our conversation: “It still eats at me, just the way we lost. When you get to that kind of game, against that kind of team, it’s inches. Anything can happen.”Losses aside, Celebrini is feeling confident going into his third year with the Sharks, now as captain. The team has brought on a number of new names this season: forwards Mason Marchment and Ivar Stenberg, and defensemen Darnell Nurse, Jacob Trouba, Michael Kesselring and Nolan Allan. Celebrini says they’re working on tightening up their defense. “We gave up a lot of scoring chances last year,” he says. “So we’ve added some pieces to clean that up.” He also cites the chemistry of his squad. “It’s going to be even more fun as we keep winning, because of the group we have and how tight our guys are. We have a really connected team…and I’ve felt that since day one.” He later adds: “I believe, and our team believes, in wanting to build something special.”Celebrini and I are situated at a window table at the restaurant in Los Gatos. He orders three carne asada tacos—“no onion and no cilantro”—and a glass of water. Nearby, a father whispers in his daughter’s ear, she looks over and smiles, then picks up her phone to type something furiously.Celebrini’s fame began with his talent, but it has been amplified by two major pop culture phenomenons: Heated Rivalry, a fictional gay hockey love story, and Off Campus, a fictional straight hockey-centric love story. These shows made a lot of watchers either hungry for love or horny (or both) and primed to look for those things within a hockey arena. Soon, spectators who’d never before been to a hockey game were filling the stands, making TikToks about “the boy aquarium” (a nickname for the rink). DJs at games began playing big needle-drop songs from Heated Rivalry—namely “I’ll Believe in Anything” by Wolf Parade and a cover of “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u.—to loud cheers. As it were, both Heated Rivalry and Off Campus actually started as books; the former was written by Rachel Reid, who once noted on her website that though her central characters, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, are not based on anyone specifically, the “extremely entertaining rivalry between Crosby and [the player Alexander] Ovechkin” was one of her “inspirations.”Celebrini is a hot topic within this runoff fandom. Especially given said audience’s clear fascination with his and Smith’s relationship. Celebrini says their friendship grew out of a mutual need to maintain a semblance of normalcy (Smith, 21, also left college early). “A lot of the older guys have kids and stuff,” says Celebrini. “We were the only ones looking to do stuff after practice, so we were just always hanging out.” They are both squarely in a highly online age demo, and their dynamic is a double-tap magnet for both people who find it heartwarming that such a platonic relationship exists in the hypermasculine world of hockey and those who ship (romantically endorse) the two. A spokesperson from the NHL tells me that the league’s highest-performing content includes both Celebrini and Smith, a duo many have nicknamed Willmack. The league is doubling down on the wider romance-fantasy of it all too: In late September, it launched “Hot for Hockey,” an audio series of short, fictional love stories based on real NHL players.Celebrini and Smith are kind of inseparable, but in staged instances—interviews or social clips—they can seem a little guarded or awkward. In a recent clip, they’re seen promoting an “elevated cupcake experience,” which was a charitable meet-and-greet for which a fan paid $17,000. The most liked comment beneath this video, which was uploaded by the bakery behind the cupcakes, reads: “this looks like a hostage video they send to families for ransom.” Another earlier post has them stiffly “doing a spin” in New York City for the social media personality Judi Jupiter, who then calls the two “perfect specimens.” (Of hockey players’ famed physiques, Celebrini—trying on jeans for the shoot at Tech CU Arena—put it plainly: “Hockey butts…they make everything smaller.”) When I ask which of his and Smith’s antics haven’t yet made it online, he, almost defensively, says, “What do you mean? What do you want?” But then softens: “When we’re on the road, and we go to a sauna or steam room kind of place, you’re supposed to be quiet. If we walk into a sauna, it’s like, we start crying-laughing.”The NHL’s chief marketing officer, Sean Eggert, says Celebrini “has quickly become one of our most visible players on and off the ice.” But even in this, he cites a clip of Celebrini and Smith that the league posted on TikTok in March of this year, referring to it as the “besties video.” In it, Celebrini is seen patiently calling Smith over during a game, with a slight and knowing smirk. Someone else’s voice is laid on top (a common trend on TikTok) saying, “Psst, hey, come here, cooooome here.” When Smith appears in the frame, the voice says, “Yaaaay.” “That was an inflection point,” says Eggert. It has millions of views.Celebrini alone is the NHL’s most popular athlete across its channels, says Eggert. Content focused on him generated north of 235 million views last season. But it’s not just that Celebrini is drawing numbers online; he’s also bringing in new viewers. Around 77% of the people who watched the “besties video” were women or girls—a figure Eggert says is “unprecedented, and disproportionate to the majority of content we put out there.” The NHL adds that most of Celebrini’s nearly 800,000 Instagram followers are female.For his part, Celebrini—who has a public and verified Instagram account and a TikTok handle he keeps private—stays pretty mum on the subject. “I’ve had things sent to me,” he says. “I see a little bit of the content that people make.” But his algorithms only show him himself “once in a while,” he says. I ask him: “What do you think of all that? The narratives people might spin, and the fan fiction element?”“I don’t really think about it,” he says, lowering his eyes and quieting his voice a little, seemingly ready to move on to another topic.Smith will tell me, via a voice note, that “out of the rink, [Mack] is just a normal kid” who “likes to have fun.” Now that we’ve been around each other all afternoon and dinner is about to wrap, he’s loosened a bit, and I can see the easygoing nature Smith described.In the brief hours of each day that Celebrini doesn’t dedicate to hockey, he has a few peripheral hobbies. He plays Wiffle ball in his yard with his buddies. The Office is his favorite TV show, and he thinks The Odyssey is “unbelievable, maybe one of the best movies ever.” He loves Drake and he loves country music—fairly standard fare for a 20-year-old.In other words, Celebrini is prodigious on the ice and is a “normal kid” off it. Such characters aren’t new in hockey, but few before him have found themselves so close to the center of a pop culture phenomenon. The NHL has always had big names, but it has not had a Gen Z personality whose fan base spans diehard hockey buffs to TikTokers who are just discovering the sport, yet might never go to a hockey game. For now, it seems, Celebrini is only selectively engaging with the latter, humoring the NHL’s desire to build his fan base without letting it bleed into how he approaches his day job. He’s far more interested in racking up goals than followers. But given his capability, his age, his looks, his concurrent rise with hockey’s broader appeal and its ascent in the conversation, he’s the sport’s runaway breakout. And the only way to go is up.Our plates have been cleared, and Celebrini is tired. But he’s polite until the end. “I don’t want to leave you high and dry,” he says, “but I think I’m going to get going.” His house is five minutes away; I half-expect Smith to show up in the borrowed Range Rover to get him. But no. So, out at the curb, one of the most valuable and adept young players in hockey stands unbothered in the half-light, waiting for his Uber, as any 20-year-old might at closing time.PRODUCTION CREDITS:Photographs by Bowen FernieSkin by David Searle at Aubri Balk Inc.Hair by Amber EspositoSpecial thanks to Courtney Mays, personal stylist to Macklin CelebriniShot on location at Sharks Ice at Tech CU Arena in San Jose