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