NHL teams falling all over themselves to court Harvard’s Hobey Baker Award winner Jimmy Vesey, a group that includes the Penguins, would be wise to dig through the award’s history and familiarize themselves with names such as Scott Fusco, Lane MacDonald and Marty Sertich.
Who, you ask?
All three won the award, which is named for the former Princeton player and World War I veteran. None of them, for various reasons, played an NHL game. As irony would have it, Fusco and MacDonald also are Harvard alums. It’s not an indictment by any stretch, but winning the Hobey Baker as college hockey’s top player certainly does not guarantee a long and prosperous NHL career because for every Paul Kariya (1993 winner, 989 NHL games, 402 goals) or Neal Broten (1981, 1,099, 289), there are twice as many who didn’t make it.