Hockey card values have been going up for a while, but nothing prepares you for a 19-year-old's rookie card clearing seven figures. A one-of-one "Outburst Gold" parallel of Macklin Celebrini's 2024-25 Upper Deck Young Guns rookie sold for $1.28 million through Goldin Auctions, and per the auction house, it's the highest publicly recorded sale for any hockey card that doesn't have Gretzky's name on it.
Spittin' Chiclets flagged the sale as the biggest non-Gretzky hockey card price ever paid.
For context on how absurd that number is: a PSA 10 Connor McDavid rookie patch auto out of The Cup, numbered to 99, sold for $571,000 CAD back in December 2025. Celebrini's card more than doubles that, and he's got zero Stanley Cups, zero MVP awards, and barely two full NHL seasons under his belt. The buyer reportedly bought the box hoping to pull a base Young Guns card after watching Celebrini light it up for Team Canada at the Olympics — instead they hit the rarest version that exists.
The card price isn't happening in a vacuum. Celebrini just wrapped a 2025-26 season with 45 goals and 115 points as a 19-year-old, a teenage scoring total that only Gretzky (137) and Sidney Crosby (120) have ever topped. He also broke Joe Thornton's long-standing franchise record for points in a season with the Sharks. This is a guy who was a Calder finalist as a rookie and is now getting mentioned in Hart Trophy conversations before he can legally rent a car in most states.
That's the real story behind the number. Card markets are basically a referendum on belief, and right now the hockey world is betting hard that Celebrini isn't just a good young player — he's the guy who's going to be the face of the league once McDavid and Crosby move on. A $1.28 million card doesn't happen because of one good Olympics; it happens because collectors think they're looking at a franchise cornerstone for the next 15 years.
Whether the price holds up is a different question — hockey card markets can be just as volatile as the stock market, and one-of-one parallels are notoriously hard to value since there's no comparable sale to point to. But for now, San Jose has its guy, the record books have a new non-Gretzky entry, and Celebrini's stock has never been higher, literally or figuratively.