Leafs pick Jeremy Bracco joining Kitchener Rangers, who will be going for OHL title

Once again, an 18-year-old hockey player gets to be turned into a political football. After five games in Hockey East with the Boston College Eagles, highly skilled Toronto Maple Leafs second-round choice Jeremy Bracco made it official that he's leaving the college program to join the Ontario Hockey League-leading Kitchener Rangers.

The timing, as Pension Plan Puppets pointed out, renders this an "odd move." This is more about what an adviser and his NHL organization muturally agree is best for the prospect  which is why those CHL vs. NCAA arguments are so tedious. If the plan all along was to have Bracco under contract and under close watch with an OHL team one hour from Toronto, it would have seemed more logical, from an outsider perspective, if it had all been effected in time for the scoring winger to have time to attend the Leafs main training camp, a full camp with the Rangers and not miss more than one-sixth of the OHL schedule.

Bracco, of course, had to give up all of that in order to play for BC (and preserve the NCAA's nominal notion of amateurism — hey, one battle at a time).

Kitchener is off to an outstanding start with a 9-0-3-0 record for an .875 point percentage. Bracco, as Waterloo Region Record beat writer Josh Brown reasons, would likely be pencilled in to replace injured scorer Adam Mascherin, whose seven goals and 17 points across 12 games is good for third in the unofficial draft-year dynamos' scoring race. (Erie's Alex DeBrincat has 20 in 10 games and Mississauga's Alex Nylander has 19 in 11.)

It's understandable that Bracco leaving BC after the season had already begun might leave college hockey proponents cold, but that is a consequence of the rules the NCAA lives by, too.

Meantime, the Rangers just became a much deeper team that is poised to "go for it, it being the OHL title." The Londion Knights are doing the same, with another Leafs draftee that played collegiately in Boston, right wing J.J. Piccinich. Suffice to say, Mark Hunter might be in the Leafs front office, but he's still having a major influence on the OHL pecking order.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @naitSAYger.