Celebrini, Smith on Origin of Their Viral LeBron-Inspired TikTok

Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith are surprised by how much their TikTok team-up blew up.

On Thursday, Smith dropped a TikTok which re-enacted a viral LeBron James video.

Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith are taking over San Jose and now TikTok— they recreated the viral LeBron driveway video 🤣

(via willcpsmith/TT) pic.twitter.com/mlseCHl4WG

— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) December 26, 2024

As of Saturday afternoon, it’s at 700K views and counting.

“We were bored. It was an off-day. We played basketball for three hours, so it was fun,” Smith said.

“We started joking around about like have you seen that TikTok? We just decided to try to recreate it,” Celebrini said. “It wasn’t very good.”

Celebrini, of course, is very much connected to basketball. His father Rick Celebrini is the Golden State Warriors’ Director of Sports Medicine and Performance. Because of that connection, the San Jose Sharks’ star rookie is friends with Warriors star Draymond Green.

Celebrini, however, said that he hadn’t heard from Green about his video.

Both did say that their San Jose Sharks teammates found the video “funny”.

The usually competitive young guns, perhaps surprisingly, didn’t have much to say about who was the better basketball player between them.

“Neither of us, really,” Celebrini said.

“We had a bunch of games. We had a massive series,” Smith said.

They also, in the best basketball fashion, deferred to each other as to who was the better performer.

“He had the tougher lines,” Smith said. “I’d say him.”

“Probably him,” Celebrini deflected.

They were also coy about potentially including landlords and San Jose Sharks legends Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau in future collabs. Celebrini lives with Thornton; Smith resides with Marleau.

“I don’t know. Don’t want to take it too far,” Smith laughed. “We’ll see though.”

Anyway, kids will be kids, except when you’re the first-overall pick of the 2024 Draft and the fourth-overall of the 2023 Draft, your TikToks go viral.

“We were just having fun with it,” Celebrini said. “We made it like three weeks ago, like it wasn’t even like yesterday or whatever. Will was like, I might post it, see what happens.”

“Had an idea it was gonna kind of blow up,” Smith said. “I didn’t think it would be that much.”