The Wild are familiar with what a young San Jose team can do. Led by budding star forwards Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith, the Sharks came into Tuesday night’s game at Grand Casino Arena on a three-game winning streak.
Further, in the last two meetings between the teams, the Sharks scored a combined 15 goals while going 1-1 in St. Paul.
For a while, it looked as though the Wild, winners of four of their past five games, would reverse that trend. They dominated the Sharks for two periods, but had only a 1-0 lead to show for it.
So when Wild defenseman David Jiricek was penalized for slashing, the other shoe seemed about to drop, and it did. The Sharks’ top line of Tyler Toffoli, Celebrini and Smith went tic-tac-toe to knot the game on Smith’s one-timer from the right circle with 10 minutes, 3 seconds left.
“It’s an 82-game season, and we didn’t have it for the first 40,” Smith said. “But we stuck with it and got it done.”
Celebrini had the first assist on both of the Sharks’ goals, the second on a 2 on 1 in the 3 on 3 overtime finished by Collin Graf, and San Jose goaltender Yaroslav Askarov stopped 28 of 29 shots he faced.
Matt Boldy one-timed a cross-ice from Mats Zucarello on a power play for the Wild’s first goal at 5:04 of the second period. Filip Gustavsson stopped 16 shots — one of them on a point-blank effort from the crease by Phillip Kurashev to preserve the Wild’s lead in the third period.
But he couldn’t stop the tying goal moments later, a tic-tac-toe play between first-line forwards Tyler Toffoli, Celebrini and Smith. Afterward, Smith could be seen on television telling Celebrini, “Let’s (blank) go!”
“I think we just knew we needed to be better,” Smith said. “Every guy, starting with me and our line, we had to be better. Asky keeping us in that, a 1-0 game after 40, after playing like that, was pretty good for us. So that helped us get it done.”
Smith’s goal was his seventh (17 points), and Cebrini’s two assists gave him 26 points in 17 games this season — even if he didn’t register a shot on goal.
When it was suggested that holding Celebrini, the first overall pick in the 2024 draft, without a shot on goal would portend victory, veteran Wild wing Marcus Foligno said, “Yeah, most nights.”
It was a tough pill to swallow for a Wild team that followed the game plan for most of the night. They held Celebrini without a shot on goal and maximized offensive pressure with a tight, aggressive forecheck.
“Every once in a while they make a good play,” Wild captain Jared Spurgeon said. “I thought earlier in the game there were some big blocks, and obviously big kills. But you’d like to (win) that one.”
The Wild now have three days off before back-to-backs against Anaheim and Vegas in St. Paul this weekend.
“We couldn’t get enough goals. We were snakebit, some of us, myself included,” said winger Marcus Foligno, whose fourth line with Yakov Trenin and center Danila Yurov had a lot of zone time but finished with just one shot on goal. “We’ve got to find ways to get it in. But the majority of the game, we liked our game.”
San Jose Sharks right wing Collin Graf, center left, celebrates with center Macklin Celebrini after scoring the game-winning goal during overtime of an NHL hockey game against the Minnesota Wild, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)