“College players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.” Bill James in Moneyball
Bill James was, of course, talking about baseball players in the quote above, but the sentiment applies generally to hockey as well. As Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper put it in their book Soccernomics (also not about hockey), “[H]ow good you are at seventeen or eighteen is a poor predictor of how good you will become as an adult. By definition, when a player is that young there is still too little information to judge him.