MONTREAL -- The Penguins are prepared to wait awhile before making their first choice in the NHL entry draft tonight at the Bell Centre.

Quite awhile, actually.

Longer than any of the other 29 teams, in fact. At least the ones who haven't traded away their opening-round choice.

The Penguins don't mind, though. On a couple of counts.

The most important, of course, is that they own the 30th choice because they won the Stanley Cup.

Every other club will be clearing off its draft table and packing up its scouting reports and prospect lists tonight when Penguins general manager Ray Shero makes his way to the stage on the arena floor to make his team's choice public and to greet the prospect it selects.

And officials from every one of those clubs will be wishing his or her team had been the one with that selection.

"I think a lot of teams would be happy to pick No. 30, if they didn't get it via a trade," said Jay Heinbuck, the Penguins' director of amateur scouting.

Heinbuck and his scouts have another reason to be excited about owning the 30th choice. It means they will be involved a whole lot earlier than they were a year ago, when a series of trades meant the Penguins' first selection was the next-to-last pick in the fourth round.

"That number [120 overall] sticks in my mind," Heinbuck said.

The Penguins will be picking 90 spots earlier, but the philosophy guiding their selection will be the same that led to them claiming Kingston center Nathan Moon with their top selection in 2008: They will go for the highest-rated player on their prospect-rankings list, regardless of position.

The primary reason for that is that the Penguins' most pressing personnel needs at the moment -- say, for a winger or two capable of playing on the top two lines -- won't necessarily be the same ones they have when players selected tonight or during rounds 2-7 tomorrow are ready to compete for jobs in the NHL.

"We're still in the situation where we have to take the player we think is going to be the best asset for us," Heinbuck said. "If it's a junior player or a European, it might be three years before he gets to us. And if it's a college guy, it might be four years, or five.

"You don't know what we're going to have four or five years from now, so we have to take the best asset."

The Penguins got used to drafting potential superstars like Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby and Jordan Staal when they were a regular among the league's bottom-feeders earlier this decade, but the caliber of prospect on the board at the end of the first round is not to be confused with what's available at the start.

The best-case scenario for the Penguins, Heinbuck believes, will be to grab a prospect who can be developed into a second- or third-line forward or No. 2 or 3 defenseman. It's possible, of course, that a player eventually will exceed projections, but it's also possible that he will fizzle or flop.

Heinbuck described the first-round depth this year as "decent" and said there probably are "21 or 22" players the Penguins believe have the kind of upside they like to see.

"We're hoping that one of those falls to us," he said. "In years past, that's happened."

Not always, though.

"Sometimes, in years past, you've looked at the 30th pick and said, 'Aw, that guy's probably an American Leaguer,' " Heinbuck said.

The Penguins could use a productive draft because they had just four selections in 2008, investing them in Moon, goalies Alexander Pechurski and Patrick Killeen and defenseman Nicholas D'Agostino.

That's no way to keep an organization stocked with quality prospects, although the 2007 draft -- which netted the promising players Luca Caputi, Dustin Jeffrey, Alex Grant, Keven Veilleux and Casey-Pierro Zabotel -- took some of the sting out of having so few choices last June.

"We were fortunate that the year before, we had a good draft," Heinbuck said. "We had eight picks, and our organization thought enough of that group that we've signed seven of the eight.

"A lot of teams can't say that. Now, we need a few of them to be players."

NOTE -- The Penguins will have one choice in each of the seven rounds, with the selections in the third and fifth having been acquired in trades with Tampa Bay. They will have the Nos. 30, 61, 63, 121, 123, 181 and 211 picks.