(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The list of players who are NHL-ready at 18 or 19 years old is really not very long at all. More often than not, sure, someone who's the first overall pick or something is for-sure 100 percent able to play in the NHL and be competitive. Far less often, though, someone who's, say, a mid-first or even high-second round pick makes a club and is capable enough.

And yet every year it seems as though an NHL team is willing to give a kid they just drafted the chance to make the team, and they keep him up. And that, in 2014, doesn't make a lot of sense.

Here's the situation in which NHL teams should keep junior-eligible players up with the big club: If they are, somehow, a high-quality talent — i.e. cannot be replaced by a regular-old free agent signing — and, if you're being honest, your team is capable of legitimately competing for the Stanley Cup. At that point, by all means, keep them up.

Since 2005-06 (the salary cap era), there have been 15 players who were just 18 years old who ended up sticking with their NHL team's roster for more than the nine-game tryouts. A lot of those names are guys you'd expect to see on there: High draft picks with elite talent levels. Guys like Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon and Steven Stamkos and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. First overall picks, that sort of thing. But high-octane performances from these players are few and far between. Of that group, just five eclipsed 0.6 points per game, which may sound like decent performance — that's looks like a second-liner's production, after all — but it's also pretty easy to find on the open market. From 2005 to present, guys like Jason Blake, Brad Boyes, Pierre-Marc Bouchard, Jussi Jokinen, and Miroslav Satan have put out about that many points per game, and these are guys who seem to bounce around the league a lot.

What's more, a lot of times these rookies that can produce that much — and remember, 13 of 18 didn't really carry much water here — are doing so because they're getting soft minutes. Their coaches make sure they start the majority of shifts in the offensive zone, and against easier competition, as a means of further boosting their scoring. More often than not that doesn't help. But what it tells you is that these are players not ready for the rigors of actually playing in the NHL. Which is fine, because most 18-year-olds aren't. Not everyone is a Crosby or even a Nugent-Hopkins.

And the fact of the matter is that even at 19 years old, most junior-level kids can't hack it at the NHL level. In addition to the 18 kids who made the big club at 18, another 79 did so a year later for their age-19 season when they still could have been assigned to juniors. The number of those guys to break even 0.5 points per game was just 20, and of that group, seven had played in the league the year before as well. So you have five 18-year-olds and 13 19-year-olds over the last nine seasons who were able to successfully convince their NHL teams they belonged and also scored at a decent enough level to justify doing so. That's 18 total players in nine seasons, but not including the youngsters playing this season, the league has given 94 of them a shot.

The reason this matters is pretty simple in today's NHL: It's asset management. If you can use a veteran player for relatively cheap instead of a highly rated rookie, you should do so at all costs because letting the rookie stay with the big club instead burns a year of his entry-level deal.

Here's an illustration of this problem: Last season, Sean Monahan played 75 games for the Flames at 19, going 22-12-34 in 75 games (0.45 per). The reason he stayed up was that in his nine-game audition with the club, he scored 5-3-8, while shooting 23.8 percent overall. At even strength, though, Monahan was a disaster: 47.4 CF% despite the easiest competition and second-easiest zone starts of any Flames forward. While four of his five goals came at 5-on-5, his on-ice shooting percentage was 12.1, and the Flames still gave up six goals (compared to seven for) while he was on the ice in his average of 13:15 per night.