Teal Chronicles #3: Three Overtimes, Three Victories

The San Jose Sharks boast a 3-0 record in overtime following game-winning heroics from Luca Cagnoni, Igor Chernyshov, and Darnell Nurse.

If that isn't a sentence you expected to read following the Sharks' fourth game of the season, you probably aren't alone.

Three wins. Three overtime victories. Three different heroes.

And perhaps most encouragingly, this latest win came without the player who carried Team Teal on his back for much of last season.

Here's why that matters.

Macklin Celebrini was the one driving San Jose's bus last season — the reason the team came so close to its first playoff berth in seven years instead of competing for dead last in the NHL once again. He finished with 45 goals and 70 assists, completing a franchise-record 115-point season.

Admittedly, he still looked sharp in the Sharks' first two wins this season, amassing five assists and setting up the game-winning goal for Chernyshov against the Los Angeles Kings.

However, when Celebrini was a last-minute scratch in Dallas on Monday, San Jose looked awful. The Stars cruised to a 5-0 victory while the Sharks mustered only 13 shots on goal.

It would have been easy to look at that performance and reach an unsettling conclusion: this team is still only competitive with Macklin Celebrini on the ice.

Last night felt different.

Granted, St. Louis is far from the team it was when the Blues flipped the script on their 2018-19 campaign and secured the first Stanley Cup in franchise history.

But the urgency San Jose showed after being outshot 11-3 in the opening period was particularly encouraging. After an opening 20 minutes that looked dangerously similar to Monday night's disaster in Dallas, the Sharks responded.

By the end of the third period, the shots were deadlocked at 26 apiece. San Jose had turned what initially looked like another potentially ugly night without its captain into its third overtime game of the young season.

Then, following a beautiful feed from rookie sensation Ivar Stenberg, Darnell Nurse buried the puck behind Blues goaltender Joel Hofer to send San Jose home with two points and improve the Sharks' record to 3-1-0.

Three wins. Three overtime winners. And this time, no #71 in the lineup.

While San Jose has a matinee game against Edmonton on Saturday, it sounds like Celebrini was close to playing Thursday — close enough to think there's a strong chance the Sharks' captain will be back in the lineup when Connor McDavid and company come to town.

And that makes San Jose's early-season position even more intriguing.

A resilient overtime victory to spoil St. Louis' home opener, sans Captain Celebrini, says a lot about the kind of talent San Jose possesses. The Sharks aren't a finished product. They've yet to win a game in regulation, and Monday's loss in Dallas showed just how ugly things can still become.

But through four games, they're 3-1-0. They've found three different overtime heroes. And they've proven, at least for one night, that they can respond to adversity and win without their best player.

This is a much better team than it was last season — and certainly a much better team than the one we saw Monday night in Dallas.

If this is what Team Teal can do without Celebrini, imagine what might be possible when the captain returns.

In the words of Rebelution, the sky is the limit in 2026-27.