Win either Grand Final and St Kilda is in the frame when discussing the great teams of the last few years. Win both, as the Saints so nearly did having led both games well into time-on in the final quarter, and we'd be talking about an early 21st century dynasty.

 

Instead, just four years later, the Saints are bunkering down at their Seaford headquarters in the final stages of prepping for this week's NAB AFL Draft, in which they hold the first pick, by virtue of their bottom-placed finish at the end of last season.

 

So how did we get here? Why are the Saints in the midst of another rebuild while teams like Hawthorn, the Sydney Swans and Geelong were contending for premierships around the same time as the Saints and continue to do so now.

 

What is clear from talking to St Kilda people – those part of the inner sanctum and the rusted-on diehards who pay their memberships every season – is that there is little second-guessing of any list management decisions made in the last 10 years.

 

Desperately seeking the club's first premiership since 1966 and just its second overall, St Kilda's list management from 2004 through to 2011 was about the present, about tweaking a side whose premiership window remained widely ajar.

 

"Most people would say whatever decisions they made then at that time were the right ones in the circumstances," said Ameet Bains, St Kilda's chief operating officer and current acting head of football.

 

"What we did was no different to other clubs," added recruiting manager, Tony Elshaug. "We just weren't as successful."

 

The Saints used the draft magnificently from 2000 to 2003 to bring in players such as Nick Riewoldt, Justin Koschitzke, Luke Ball, Leigh Montagna, Nick Dal Santo, Sam Fisher and Brendon Goddard and they formed the nucleus of the side that made preliminary finals in 2004 and 2005 under Grant Thomas and the 2009 and 2010 Grand Finals under Ross Lyon.

 

But they also traded heavily during that period and the cavalcade of recycled players who made their way to the club from other clubs included Brent Guerra, Stephen Powell, Jason Gram, Aaron Fiora, Cain Ackland, Mark McGough, Matthew Clarke, Sean Dempster, Farren Ray, Stephen Powell, Adam Schneider, Zac Dawson, Andrew Lovett, Michael Gardiner, Steven King, Brett Peake, Barry Brooks and Charlie Gardiner.

 

Some did, and continue until now, to give the Saints wonderful service. And it is hard to be critical when the 2009 group won 20 games, the most ever by St Kilda in a home and away season, and the 2010 team ended up in a drawn Grand Final. Only the 1966 team, which won the flag, has done better.

 

And recent premiership teams, the Sydney Swans and Hawthorn, have both eschewed early draft picks in favour of trading, and have been widely lauded for doing so.

 

"It would have gone down in folklore if St Kilda had got up," said Elshaug who was an assistant coach under Lyon before moving into recruiting.

 

But while the Saints were largely topping up, they rarely distinguished themselves at the draft. James Gwilt (2004), Sam Gilbert (2005), David Armitage (2006), Ben McEvoy and Jack Steven (both 2007) were excellent selections, particularly Steven, who won the 2013 best and fairest.

 

But they whiffed on many more. Between 2003 and 2010, St Kilda's draft selections inside the top 50 of their year that failed to fire include Brad Howard, Tom Lynch, Nick Heyne, Nick Winmar, Jamie Cripps and Tom Ledger. 

 

The other complication was the structure of the list. For several years, a feature of the St Kilda payment structure was that when a player earned a bonus payment for, say, a best and fairest placing or a number of games played, that sum would be added to the player's base payment each year for the remainder of the contract. A string of high finishes in the best and fairest coupled with achieving other incentives might add a six figure sum to a player's contract each year for several years.

 

This net effect of these compounding bonuses was that the star players at St Kilda were commanding a far higher percentage of the club's total player payments, than at other clubs. Whereas the top 10 players at most clubs were taking up 50 per cent of the salary cap, at St Kilda, that figure had blown out to about 62 per cent by the end of 2011.

 

It was clearly unsustainable for much longer but given how close the Saints came to breaking their premiership drought in 2009 and 2010, who could blame them for their short-term thinking?

 

But the hard decisions could not be delayed for too long. Early in their tenure in 2011, both Bains and Chris Pelchen, St Kilda's then head of football, met regularly with AFL salary cap guru Ken Wood, to work through the obvious challenges.

 

Traditionally there have been two types of wooden spoon. For a long time, it was the most unwanted prize in football, the end result of a dreadful year and for the club and its supporters, an unwanted cross to bear.

 

More recently, there has been more cynicism around the spoon and in some cases it has become a convenient list management tool and a desired weapon for clubs to kick-start a rebuild.

 

St Kilda's 2014 wooden spoon was neither. 

"It wasn't a list management tool and it certainly wasn't a case of 'let's finish as low as we can to give us the best chance to rebuild'," said coach Alan Richardson.

 

"If you would have told me at the start of the year that if you made decisions like trading McEvoy and Dal Santo, turn the list over heavily and then lose David Armitage (who missed seven games), Gilbert (16 games) and Jarryn Geary (15 games), then perhaps it was the inevitable outcome of some decisions that had been made earlier.

 

"It wasn't an intention of ours to lose so many games and as coach you have to build the most competitive environment, not one where blokes are complacent and treading water, so that would never happen," Richardson said.

 

The Saints played 42 players in 2014; a figure Richardson said was bound to lead to struggles in "connectivity and flow".

 

"A lot of intelligent footy people would say that our wooden spoon was understandable. But what we need to do now is to make sure that it's not acceptable and that this is not where we’re at."

 

Three picks inside the first 22 on Thursday night at the draft will inject more elite talent into the club.

 

"It is interesting," said chief executive Matt Finnis. "When you have conversations with people in the industry you understand what it means to have the no.1 pick, so coming out of the trade period and keeping the first pick, what is not lost on us is the impact it will have and the fillip it will be for what we are trying to create here."

 

The positive for the Saints is they appear to have got their drafting right. Recent drafts have yielded Seb Ross, Jimmy Webster, Jack Newnes, Nathan Wright and Spencer White while this time last year Jack Billings, Luke Dunstan and Blake Acres all lobbed at the club and would appear to have incredibly bright futures. 

Former Gold Coast player Mav Weller finished in the top 10 in the best and fairest coming off the rookie list, while fellow rookie Eli Templeton also showed enormous in four games before a season-ending arm injury.

 

How quickly the fast-track of their development continues will determine just how much longer the Saints will be the wooden-spoon club.