MELBOURNE recruiting manager Barry Prendergast believes the club recruited for "the long term" on Saturday, but has not ruled out any of the six new draftees playing senior footy in the near future.
The Demons picked up a mixed bag of talent at the NAB AFL Draft, and managed to address a handful of needs such as acquiring a key forward, pace through the midfield, and talent with strong kicking ability.
Prendergast believes any of the six that includes Jack Watts (pick No.1 overall), Sam Blease (No.17), James Strauss (No.19), Jamie Bennell (No.35), Neville Jetta (No.51) and Rohan Bail (No.64) could play as early as next year – and considers the club's deepest pick the biggest chance.
"It depends on how they develop over the course of the pre-season this year, whether they play next year," he told melbournefc.com.au after the draft.
"Bail has already been playing senior footy so he's in a much better position to be able to step up fairly quickly.
"How the season pans out for the club will have something to do with that as well.
"We won't put any expectations on them. We've got two picks that are still doing year 12 – Watts and Blease.
"It's a very long term view for us, and we're more concerned about getting players onto our list that can hopefully play for 10 years."
Prendergast said the Demons completed their due diligence on Watts a few weeks ago, which is when they made the decision to snare the key forward with the top pick.
"I just don't think you can make a call on something like that until all the data has come through," he said.
"All the draft camp data came through, all the psychological testing results, and then that just validates what you already think.
"After that, the decision became logical because that's the only way you can look at it."
The Demons made an on-the-spot decision to pass on their final selection on Saturday, which gives them the first selection in the pre-season draft.
"We had a very open mind about pick 76 and we just felt that the way the draft had gone, we weren't confident to call out a name," Prendergast said.
"We weren't super confident of calling someone's name out there, so we thought we would let the dust settle for a couple of weeks and use it in the pre-season draft."
Prendergast said the Demons don't have a particular player in mind for the December 16 draft, and will analyse their full list over the next two weeks in order to identify what type they should look at recruiting.
"We're open minded about any player, and now we can look at what we've actually added to our list and maybe look if there's someone out there that fulfils a need," he said.
"In the end, we just want some talent on our list that we believe can play AFL football for a long period of time.
"Everyone has that philosophy, but we're in a rebuilding phase of our footy club and we're looking very long term with the players that we pick."