A Macklin Celebrini 1-of-1 Sold for $1.281 Million. It Is Now the Biggest Non-Gretzky Hockey Card Ever.
A 2024-25 Upper Deck Young Guns Outburst Gold Celebrini rookie, numbered one-of-one, closed at $1,281,000 at Goldin on August 15. It cleared the previous highs for McDavid, Crosby, and Ovechkin, and it was pulled out of a hobby box by a collector chasing a base rookie.
Hockey cards do not usually lead the hobby news cycle. This week they did.
A 2024-25 Upper Deck Young Guns Outburst Gold Macklin Celebrini rookie card, numbered 1-of-1 and authenticated by PSA, sold for $1,281,000 on Saturday, August 15 in Goldin's 2026 Monthly Sports Elite #7 auction. It is now the most expensive hockey card ever sold that does not have Wayne Gretzky on it.
What the Record Actually Means
The number to keep in perspective is the one it did not beat. A PSA 10 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookie sold privately for $5.2 million in 2021, and that remains the ceiling for the sport. Gretzky is his own asset class.
What Celebrini's card did break is the tier below that, which is arguably the more interesting number. This result cleared the previous high-water marks for the modern era's biggest names:
- Connor McDavid - long considered the modern hockey card benchmark
- Sidney Crosby - two decades of collector demand behind him
- Alex Ovechkin - the all-time goals record holder
A 19-year-old with two NHL seasons behind him just outsold all three. That is a statement about how the modern 1-of-1 market works more than it is a statement about Celebrini's place in hockey history.
Why Celebrini, and Why Now
The on-ice case is not thin. In his second season with the San Jose Sharks, Celebrini finished fourth in league scoring with 115 points (45 goals, 70 assists) and placed fourth in Hart Trophy voting. He is a legitimate franchise center on a team that has spent years rebuilding around him.
But the card matters as much as the player. Young Guns is the most recognized rookie card brand in hockey, full stop. Upper Deck's exclusive NHL license means there is no competing flagship rookie, no parallel ecosystem across three manufacturers diluting the chase. When collectors want the Celebrini rookie, there is one answer. The Outburst Gold 1/1 sits at the very top of that single pyramid.
Scarcity plus consensus equals price. Hockey has less collector volume than basketball or football, but it has something those categories have lost: one flagship rookie card that everyone agrees on.
The Pull Story
The card did not come out of a vault. According to reporting on the sale, a collector named James bought a hobby box hoping to land a standard Celebrini Young Guns rookie, at roughly $15 a pack, and pulled the one-of-one instead.
That is the story the hobby will retell for years, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. Outcomes like this are the extreme tail of a distribution. The median hobby box of that product returned nothing close. But the existence of the tail is a real part of why people rip wax, and pretending otherwise misreads the hobby.
What This Does to the Rest of the Hockey Market
Expect three things over the next few weeks:
- Celebrini base Young Guns listings reprice upward. Headline sales pull the whole player up, usually briefly. Sellers move first, buyers follow slower.
- Other young-star 1/1s get consigned. A record makes owners of comparable cards think about liquidity. Watch for more high-end hockey in fall auction catalogs.
- 2024-25 Upper Deck Series 1 and 2 sealed wax gets attention. Boxes that people were sitting on suddenly have a lottery story attached.
The caution: a single 1-of-1 result is one data point involving two bidders. It sets a record; it does not set a market. If you are pricing a PSA 10 base Celebrini Young Guns off this sale, you are extrapolating from the least comparable card in the entire product.
The Practical Takeaway
Hockey has spent a decade as the fourth sport in the U.S. card hobby. Results like this do not change that overnight, but they do move it into the conversation right as the 2026-27 season approaches and Upper Deck's fall release calendar opens up.
If you have been curious about hockey wax, the entry point is cheap relative to basketball or football, and Young Guns is the whole game. Talk to a shop that actually stocks hockey - many do not carry it deeply.
Auction results reflect a single sale and are not a guarantee of future value. Use The Card Shop Finder to find card shops near you that carry hockey product.