NHL Draftees Staying in School

About 16 months ago, Jimmy Vesey waited nervously in his seat at Pittsburgh’s Consol Energy Center.

He didn’t want to be there.

The crushing experience of the year before was still too fresh. Then, Vesey had watched from the comfort of his own home as all 30 National Hockey League teams passed on the opportunity to secure the rights to sign him in his first year of eligibility.

This time, he had to experience the anxiety in person at the 50th annual NHL Entry Draft.

As the third round opened, he tensely listened for the invitation to descend the stairs to the draft floor, where his combine roommate and future teammate Brian Hart was already donning a Tampa Bay Lightning jersey and making friends with an NHL legend. The wait was getting unbearable.

And then, just like that, it happened: a voice from a team’s draft desk registered over the PA, and a name flashed on the scoreboard. With the 66th overall pick in the 2012 NHL Entry Draft, the Nashville Predators had selected Jimmy Vesey.

COLLEGE HOCKEY ON THE RISE

Each June, NHL general managers, coaches, and scouts convene to call first dibs on about 210 of the best 18-to-20-year-old players in the world. Unlike their basketball and football counterparts, hockey prospects can enter a professional draft without losing their amateur status.

In 2013-14, 200 drafted players will compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Nine will wear Crimson.

Harvard boasts the sixth-largest contingent of NHL draft picks in college hockey with sophomore forwards Vesey and Hart, freshman forwards Alexander Kerfoot and Sean Malone, junior forwards Colin Blackwell and Petr Placek, junior defensemen Pat McNally and Max Everson; and junior goaltender Steve Michalek. They will take the ice at a time in which a collegiate route to the pros has never been a more viable option.

When Herb Brooks coached 20 American college students to the Miracle on Ice, college hockey was still considered a fringe path to the NHL. All 42 prospects picked in the first two rounds of the 1980 Entry Draft opted to forego their NCAA eligibility to play in the Canadian major junior leagues.

Times have changed. The rapid growth of youth hockey across the United States has elevated the quality of the NCAA’s go-to talent pool of American-born players. College hockey alums populate the front offices of NHL franchises. The recent MVP-level success of college players like Martin St. Louis, Jonathan Toews, Tim Thomas, and Jonathan Quick hasn’t hurt either.

“If you look back when [Harvard coach Ted Donato ‘91] was playing, the number of NHLers who came from college was probably in the ballpark of 15 percent,” said Nate Ewell, Director of Communications for College Hockey, Inc., a non-profit marketing arm of NCAA division I hockey. “If you look at the NHL now, 30 percent of players come from college.”

A record 30.5 percent of players who suited up for NHL teams in the 2011-12 season had college hockey experience. Yet the pull to go pro early remains strong, leaving prospects with important decisions.

BUILD-UP TO THE DRAFT

Now Harvard sophomores, Vesey and Hart look back on their draft day fondly.

“Once I heard my name, it was just a total relief,” Vesey said. “One of the best moments of my life.”

After celebrating with the large family support teams that sat with them, Hart and Vesey made their way to the draft floor to meet with personnel from their new organizations. For Hart, that meant meeting the Hall of Fame center responsible for his selection, Tampa Bay General Manager Steve Yzerman.

“I was a huge fan of him growing up, and it was just an honor to meet him on the floor,” Hart said. “That was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in hockey.”

The days leading up to these happy moments were intense. Two weeks before the draft, Hart and Vesey shared a Toronto hotel room for the annual NHL Combine, a four-day event that includes fitness tests, medical evaluations, and interviews with scouts from each NHL team.

Hart and Vesey had received visits from NHL scouts in the months leading up to the combine, but the stakes were higher in Toronto. There, the American prospects engaged in a rapid-fire series of job interviews with the scouting departments of each interested franchise.

“Some teams are right in your face, with really intense questions,” Hart said. “They try to rattle you a little bit, kind of get in your face and see how you react under pressure.”

Many scouts asked Hart and Vesey about their decision to play for Harvard rather than a Canadian major junior team or another school. For most teams, their NCAA commitments were a non-factor.

“Most guys said that if their kid were going through the same process, they’d want him to do the exact same thing,” Hart recalled.

Others seemed to blanch at drafting a Harvard kid. While a bias against NCAA hockey has generally disappeared from the NHL, a number of scouts still seem to favor less academically-inclined options.

“Some teams told me straight up that they [didn’t] know if they could draft me strictly because I’d go to Harvard,” Vesey said. “Some teams would ask me, ‘So you’re going to Harvard?’ and then, ‘Do you want to be a hockey player or do you want to be a student?’”

But an anti-Crimson bias among some teams may be matched by a pro-Crimson bias among others. In 2009, Harvard alum and Boston Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli ’87 traded with Minnesota Wild GM and former teammate Chuck Fletcher ’90 for the rights to sign Alex Fallstrom ’13. Nine different NHL teams hold the rights to the nine draft picks who currently play for Harvard.

NHL teams also met with Vesey and Hart during draft weekend, hours before their selections. By the time Hart took his seat for the the second round, he could only guess where he would land.

“At the combine I had no idea who had the most interest. It was back-to-back-to-back, 15-minute interviews,” Hart said. “In general, I really had no idea until draft day who I was going to be drafted by.”

THE ALLURE OF MAJOR JUNIORS

Historically, Canadian major junior hockey has represented the quickest and most popular pipeline for young NHL talent.

Players between the ages of 16 and 20 are eligible to play in the Canadian Hockey League, a 60-team umbrella organization of three sub-leagues that play in Canada and the northern United States. Since some CHL players may sign contracts with NHL teams, all CHL players must forfeit their NCAA eligibility.

The CHL more closely mirrors the NHL than the NCAA does with respect to schedule length and specific rules. The CHL’s talent pool is also arguably deeper than the NCAA’s, and CHL teams compete for the prestigious Memorial Cup in May.

The pressure to play in the CHL is relatively low for New England-born players like Hart and Vesey, whose fathers both played college hockey. But in Canada and areas of the United States that have weaker traditions of college hockey, the CHL’s pull is considerably stronger. Hailing from Toronto, Harvard freshman and New Jersey Devils draft pick Alexander Kerfoot faced a real decision.

“For people who go to major juniors, it’s a pretty enticing offer,” Kerfoot said. “It’s basically a semi-professional league. So people will get drawn in and go there, but I just think that college hockey has really improved in the last couple of years.”

For Kerfoot, the opportunity to play hockey while getting an education was too good to pass up. He also feels that Harvard’s shorter schedule will allow him more time to develop in the weight room and hone his skills. In its first four years of existence, College Hockey, Inc., has heavily promoted these and other advantages of college hockey.

“Our message is really, ‘Unless you’re going to be a surefire NHLer at 19, or if you have so little interest in academics that you wouldn’t succeed in a college environment, then college is something you should definitely consider,’” Ewell said.

Only about 15 teenagers may have the chance to play in the NHL each year.

College Hockey, Inc., moderates showcases across Canada in which American college coaches explain the rules of the recruiting process and what it means to play in the NCAA. Ryan Kennedy, a senior columnist for The Hockey News, applauds the organization’s efforts.

“I think [College Hockey, Inc., is] doing a great job,” Kennedy said. “They are a good intermediary [and] source of information for kids that are trying to make this pretty big decision in their lives… It’s a matter of knowing what the rules are, and I think College Hockey Inc. has done a very good job of explaining that.”

North American players need not forego junior hockey entirely to maintain NCAA eligibility. College prospects may play in less-competitive American junior leagues like the United States Hockey League for one or two years before they enroll in a university. In the year leading up to his Harvard debut, Vesey set single-season Eastern Junior Hockey League records for points and goals with the South Shore Kings.

PLAYER DEVELOPMENT IN THE NCAA

Although drafted NCAA players may not sign contracts with professional teams, they remain in close contact with their organizations throughout their college years. Scouts travel to select Harvard games to meet with their team’s draft pick and watch him play. NHL front offices offer advice, analyze game film, and receive progress reports from Donato.

“If they’re coming in for the weekend, they’ll usually email me or call me about when they’re coming in,” Vesey said of the Predators employees who track his progress. “It’s a little bit more pressure, but I try to ignore it and just go out there and play like any other game.”

An NHL team also communicates with an NCAA prospect about when he might be ready to take the next step in his career. Often, this next step happens before a player has completed his degree.

“I think if a guy is certainly ready to play in the NHL, then that’s something that we encourage,” Ewell said. “We are proud [of] how our college teams can develop players and get them ready to step into the NHL. Where we have concern is when players leave too early and aren’t quite prepared for that level of competition and leave themselves with a lot of work to do to get their degree.”

For some players, the decision to leave a college team early pays dividends. Toews left the University of North Dakota after his sophomore year in 2007 to sign with the Chicago Blackhawks and was named the MVP of the Stanley Cup playoffs three years later. For other players, it can represent a questionable gamble.

In the 2009-10 NCAA season, Harvard freshman and first-round draft pick Louis Leblanc took home Ivy League Rookie of the Year honors with 23 points in 31 games. By the next season, Leblanc had signed a three-year deal with the Montreal Canadiens.

Leblanc played one successful season in the CHL before appearing in 42 games for the Canadiens in 2011-12. Since then, however, the Quebec native has been relegated to minor league play. Leblanc was among the Canadiens’ first group of cuts for the 2013-14 season.

Ewell noted that most college players who decide to go pro early usually have less academic ground to make up than Leblanc.

“In most cases we’ve found, especially recently, players have been staying three years at a minimum, and that gives them a great shot at finishing their degree in the summer or even online in some cases,” Ewell said.

Of the 271 former NCAA players who appeared in the 2012-13 NHL season, 71 percent spent three or more years in college. Fourty four percent stayed a full four years. The Crimson’s most recent Ivy League Rookie of the Year will be sticking around at least one more season.

“My personal opinion is that a college player should only leave before graduating if he has dominated the league so much that it wouldn’t benefit him any more to stay in college hockey,” Vesey said. “Nashville has told me that they don’t care if I stay all four years, because with some teams that might be an issue.”

Louis Leblanc’s former classmate, Alex Killorn ’12, played through all four years of his eligibility before signing a contract with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Killorn had a breakout rookie season last year and seems to have secured a solid spot on Tampa Bay’s depth chart.

“Killorn’s a great story,” Kennedy said. “There’s a player who really benefitted from playing in the NCAA, where he took that development time and turned himself into a prospect.”

Ultimately, the NHL offers only about 700 jobs, most of which won’t be opening up any time soon. Most of the 211 players selected in Hart and Vesey’s draft will not see any NHL playing time, and even fewer will enjoy lengthy careers at the highest level of hockey.

But as the sport continues to grow in the United States and schools like Harvard increase their yields of elite talent, the future promises more college hockey success stories.

“Right now I’m just taking it year by year,” Vesey said. “I had a pretty solid freshman year, and I’m trying to build off that and see where it takes me.”

—Staff writer Michael D. Ledecky can be reached at michael.ledecky@thecrimson.com.