What do those books say about drafting? It's interesting that you propose spending more money on scouting and MS proposes less.
A lot of the sports analytics papers show that you can use data methods to extract consensus from scouting reports. From that perspective it would be better to have more scouts - with more reports you'd have more data to analyze.
In Moneyball, it was all about OBP (on base percentage) and other metrics that other baseball guys were not looking at. This was also in 2002 so a lot of teams have caught up in that regard. The A's also valued college guys more than high school guys.
Billy Beane, however, was forced to do this because his owner was a cheapskate and would not spend to the cap. The A's were merely trying to compete. That's why it's a slightly different situation with the Canucks, at least Aquaman is willing to spend to the cap.
In Soccernomics, there is no draft. But some of the main principles are:
1. Use the wisdom of crowds.
2. Certain nationalites are overvauled.
3. Older players are overvauled.
4. Sell any player when another club offers more than he is worth.
5. Replace your best players even before you sell them.
There's a lot more but I don't want to copy verbatim.
In regards to hockey, I would only say there needs more advance stats that we can gather on a player, the better. I'm not sure what those stats are but hockey still looks at +/- or other simple stats.