TUESDAY night's NAB AFL Draft might be considered shallow in talent, but with four early picks Carlton list manager Stephen Silvagni is confident his club can cash in.

The Blues have the coveted first pick at the Adelaide Convention Centre, which is widely expected to secure the services of key defender Jacob Weitering.

But with three other first-round selections (eight, 11, 19), Silvagni said Tuesday night would go a long way to helping Carlton rebuild.

"We've started our rebuild, we've obviously made 15 changes to our list," Silvagni said.

"We are going young, we've traded young players in in the trade period and we're going to have roughly five, six picks at this draft tonight.

"It's obviously a significant draft [given] the fact we've got four picks inside 19.

"It's significant in terms of our rebuild and we think we'll get talent through."

AFL national talent manager Kevin Sheehan agreed that talent was there for the taking, convinced that while the draft appeared to level out after the first round there remained brilliant players at the top end.

Sheehan said a front-ended draft simply meant clubs have had to dig deeper and research more stringently in the lead up.

The players were always there to be unearthed, he said, pointing to the last time the draft was held in Adelaide (1997) as proof.

"It's fairly even at the back end but I reckon it's super exciting, and absolute talent [is available] in the first round," Sheehan said.


"That means clubs need to be thorough, they'll take their time, go back over lots of tape in the last number of weeks to fine tune the latest selections.

"You only hark back to the last time we had the draft here, 1997, and the names that come out of it – Chad Cornes at No.9, you had Chris Tarrant (No.8) taken, at No.31 it was Simon Black and then Adam Goodes at No.43.

"Household names in the game eventually but some of those were taken later on … people just couldn't quite see the future."