{"id":425889,"date":"2026-01-24T17:22:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T17:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/425889\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T17:22:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T17:22:13","slug":"fast-goals-free-tacos-the-sharks-are-the-best-show-in-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/425889\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast goals, free tacos \u2014 the Sharks are the best show in town"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN JOSE \u2014 You could hear the roar from The Alameda.<\/p>\n

Inside the SAP Center on Friday night<\/a>, the noise wasn\u2019t just loud; it was the sonic equivalent of a jet engine engaging its afterburners. The Sharks, a franchise that has spent the better part of this decade in a hibernation so deep it bordered on comatose<\/a>, aren\u2019t just awake.<\/p>\n

No, they\u2019re chugging Red Bulls and crushing the empty cans against their foreheads<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lost amid the euphoria of the first relevant Sharks season in a good long while is the fact that this team is still a collection of kids figuring things out on the fly.<\/p>\n

And boy, can they fly.<\/p>\n

It took all of seven minutes and 37 seconds for San Jose to hang three goals on the board on Friday. According to the Sharks, it was the fastest fulfillment of the \u201cFree Tacos\u201d promotion in franchise history.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen microwaved burritos take longer to heat up than this Sharks offense did in its 3-1 win over the Rangers on Friday.<\/p>\n

The multi-point registerers in that opening flurry were Macklin Celebrini, Will Smith, and Colin Graf.<\/p>\n

For those keeping score at home, the last time the Sharks scored three goals that quickly to start a game was in 2011. Back then, Celebrini was five years old. Smith was six. Graf was a relatively ancient nine. They were probably more concerned with SpongeBob than the Stanley Cup playoffs.<\/p>\n

Now? They\u2019re turning NHL defenses into traffic cones.<\/p>\n

That top line\u2019s youth isn\u2019t a detriment \u2014 it\u2019s a weapon. They play with the kind of audacity that only exists before life beats the optimism out of you. They are, in turn, creating existential crises for opponents with blind backhand tape-to-tape passes and audacious full-ice breakouts.<\/p>\n

But here is the scary part for the rest of the league: It\u2019s not just the marquee names that are on the ascent.<\/p>\n

Celebrini and Smith might be leading the way and stealing the attention, but the rest of this Sharks\u2019 rebuild is operating at an accelerated pace as well.<\/p>\n

This team is giving 18-year-old Michael Misa more shifts each night. A month ago, Misa looked two steps behind, like a freshman trying to find his locker on the first day of high school. Now? He\u2019s only a half-step off, and there are shifts where the geometry of the game clicks into place and you can see the Ryan Nugent-Hopkins-like skill.<\/p>\n

The addition of end-to-end bomber Kieffer Sherwood is likely to create even more space for Misa, allowing the 2025 first-round pick to go from a guy with deft skill to an obvious game-changer.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Sam Dickinson \u2014the Sharks\u2019 2024 other first-round pick \u2014 who suddenly looks like he\u2019s been killing penalties for a decade.<\/p>\n

And all the while, this team is using Graf, all of 23, like a sage veteran \u2014 he\u2019s always making the smart play and jumpstarting the squad when the hyper kids crash. (As they all do.)<\/p>\n

You have Pavol Regenda, who at 25 is essentially a senior citizen by Sharks standards. But he had 19 NHL games under his belt coming into this season. In his last 13 NHL contests for the Sharks, he has established himself as a legitimate top-six power forward. On Friday, he drew two penalties and scored a backhanded goal from the slot that was so disgusting that Misa, Celebrini, Dickinson, and Smith should have needed parental permission to watch it.<\/p>\n

And in net? You have 30-year-old Alex Nedeljovic. He\u2019s now a certified goon<\/a>, but he was a certified wall Friday, and he\u2019s playing arguably the best hockey of his career. That\u2019s nice in and of itself, but it\u2019s also pushing 23-year-old phenom Yaroslav Askarov to be at his best every time he gets the crease. It\u2019s a competition, sure, but it\u2019s the kind that lifts all boats and keeps the Sharks\u2019 goalie of the future on his toes \u2014 which is always a good thing.<\/p>\n

Even William Eklund, the 23-year-old \u201cold guard\u201d of the franchise, looks better these days, establishing himself as a dirty-work All-Star with All-Star mitts to match.<\/p>\n

This team doesn\u2019t just have momentum; they are careening toward league domination like an Olympic alpine skier.<\/p>\n

And frankly, we needed this.<\/p>\n

Look around the Bay Area sports landscape right now. It\u2019s a bit of a drag, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

The Giants seem to have no interest in keeping pace with the Dodgers in the National League West. (They\u2019re really going to start both Drew Gilbert and Casey Schmitt?)<\/p>\n

The Warriors are down bad, in the worst of ways; we\u2019re in the final days of that once-incredible empire.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the 49ers are in a deeply peculiar state of limbo. Plus, anytime you check your phone, you expect to see a report saying another one was hurt.<\/p>\n

In a market starved for juice, the Sharks are a crate of top-shelf, freshly squeezed oranges.<\/p>\n

The joy, the positivity, and the wonderful naivety of this group are something to cherish. This ascent is going to be an exceptionally fun ride.<\/p>\n

Because the here and now is pretty great already: Celebrini was getting MVP chants in the first period on Friday.<\/p>\n

And you know what? They were warranted, even though he\u2019s 19 years old.<\/p>\n

What happens when he\u2019s 25? Thirty?<\/p>\n

We\u2019re on the precipice of something earth-shaking in the South Bay, and yet the mere sight of a full Shark Tank feels like enough to call this season a rousing success.<\/p>\n

The Sharks are the seventh-youngest team in the NHL, but when you weigh their points-per-year, they are even younger than that.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t know they\u2019re not supposed to be this good yet.<\/p>\n

Typical brash teenagers \u2014 they\u2019re not even asking for permission to beat these other teams.<\/p>\n

They just keep skating. They just keep scoring. And they \u2014 from Celebrini on down \u2014 just keep getting better.<\/p>\n

San Jose, enjoy the tacos.<\/p>\n

But savor this team even more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JOSE \u2014 You could hear the roar from The Alameda. Inside the SAP Center on Friday night,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":425890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5127],"tags":[5,2614,1180,4,519,168,5306,5305,1780,2615,43,350],"class_list":{"0":"post-425889","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose-sharks","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-inside-sports","10":"tag-latest-headlines","11":"tag-nhl","12":"tag-san-jose","13":"tag-san-jose-sharks","14":"tag-sanjose","15":"tag-sanjosesharks","16":"tag-sharks","17":"tag-sharks-alert","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-sports-columnists"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/115951236063830320","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}