After finishing his fourth season at Northeastern, serving as the 92nd unique player to be named Captain, senior defenseman Vinny Borgesi signed his first NHL contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Borgesi’s contract includes at Amateur Tryout Contract (ATO) to play with the Toronto Marlies of the AHL, and the full entry-level contract starts in 2026-27. It is a type-year contract with a $987,500 cap hit annually.
Borgesi finished his career with 80 points (16 goals) in 134 games, playing in all 36 games his senior season. He is only the third Northeastern defenseman since the turn of the century to have three consecutive 20 point seasons, joining program greats Jim Fahey and Jeremy Davies. He was named captain of the first-ever US Collegiate Selects team at the Spengler Cup as a senior, and was named a Hockey East Second Team All Star. His calling card while skating for the Huskies became his seemingly endless endurance on the ice; Borgesi led the nation in time-on-ice as a senior with an average of 27:11 minutes per game (including four games with over 30 minutes skated), and led the nation in TOI as a junior with 28:04 TOI (featuring seven games with over 30 minutes TOI, one of which was a 40:47 mark in the Huskies’ double overtime loss at TD Garden). In an age where “load management” is a term not uncommon in the world of sports, Borgesi regularly performed in a class all his own.
Borgesi made an impact right from his Huskies debut. Entering Northeastern with the pedigree of an offensive defenseman who could move the puck extremely well, he started on the third pair with fellow freshman Jackson Dorrington in a lineup consisting of eight future NHLers and ten players who would go on to sign entry-level contracts. Often overlooked in his career due to his height, Borgesi would make sure that fans and watchers alike would remember his name for a long time by scoring his first collegiate goal in overtime to help the Huskies defeat Long Island in that season opener.
In his sophomore season, Borgesi would go on to set a career high in points (28), goals (5), and assists (23), and have a personal-best 3 points in games against Stonehill, Vermont, BU, and Maine, as well as a career-best six-game points streak from late-January into mid-February. He’d match that goal total as a junior and a senior, and the game-high three points against Brown as a junior.
Borgesi was always seen as a leader on the team, as evidenced by wearing a letter for multiple seasons. As a senior, however, the weight and responsibilities being latest in a near-100 year long line of Huskies captains amplified that pressure, and he was ready for it. In our preseason interview with members of the team, Borgesi was very adamant about where his mentality was: “everything this year is team first. Everything is about the team, about learning, taking steps every single day to get better day by day and staying in the moment….I don’t want anything for myself, I don’t want to look ahead, I try to stay in the moment and control what I can control. It’s all about the team and what we can do each and every day to buy in and win games.”
That leadership style saw the Huskies jump out to one of their best starts in recent history, and multiple program milestones get accomplished in the first half of the year. The program’s 1100th win, against UMass-Amherst; the program’s first victory over national powerhouse Denver in over 30 years; the program’s first weekend sweep of Boston College, with a third victory over the Eagles added in the Spring to end the regular season; an overtime win against UMass-Amherst again in the Huskies’ final victory at Matthews Arena; and Borgesi taking center stage in the profound passing-of-the-torch ceremony after the final game in the building’s history in December.
In many ways, Borgesi was the perfect embodiment of Northeastern University hockey. Undersized, overlooked, undervalued- but it did not matter. Vinny Borgesi’s entire hockey career was about hard work, seeing the process through, and proving those who did not believe wrong every step of the way. He could have left at any point- the NHL came calling. Opportunities at other schools arose if he wanted to leave Northeastern. He turned them all away to stay and see his commitment and his duty to Northeastern through. It’s easy for fans to say “there will never be another” when a great player leaves school, but someone as talented and as beloved universally by coaches, teammates, and fans, it would be hard to disagree with that statement for Vinny Borgesi.
Since signing, Borgesi earned his first professional point with an assist, and is still with the Marlies in their AHL playoff run for the Clark Cup. We are excited to see how many more he can pile up as he continues to prove people wrong in his professional career.
