ST. PAUL, Minn. — When Ben Dexheimer was deciding where to sign as a free agent after his college season concluded with a loss in the national championship game in April, a handful of teams reached out to the University of Wisconsin captain.The Edina native wasn’t expecting his hometown Minnesota Wild to be a factor in his decision, as they’d had only one meeting with him during the season. But the Wild made a push late, and the right-shot defenseman was intrigued.It wasn’t just for sentimental reasons or because the team is a contender. It was their depth chart.“You’ve got to see how many picks they have coming, how many free agents they plan on signing,” Dexheimer said. “With the Quinn Hughes trade, they don’t have much in the system. So I think it bodes well for me. Not going to be a ton of picks coming in.“Even if they are, I’m not looking for the easiest route. I was looking for the best situation. I can work my way into any lineup.”The Athletic has already done a deep dive on the Wild prospect pool this offseason, looking at potential trade chips they have to go big-game hunting. As Dexheimer noted, after sending a big haul to the Vancouver Canucks in the Hughes trade, and also one to the Columbus Blue Jackets a year earlier in the David Jiricek trade, there’s not much left.And they only have five picks in this weekend’s draft, starting in the third round Saturday. It’s also likely that the Wild will trade more of their upcoming first-round picks to acquire win-now assets.That means what they can do in Rounds 2 through 7 of upcoming drafts, to quote president of hockey operations and general manager Bill Guerin, “is going to be huge.”It also makes it a good time to look at the Wild’s track record in recent years, though, notably, it will be a different person making the picks after former director of amateur scouting Judd Brackett left for an elevated role with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Director of European scouting Ricard Persson will make the picks this year, and at some point this offseason, the Wild will begin the process of replacing Brackett full-time.“By and large, (Brackett) did a really good job both in Vancouver and Minnesota, especially with his earliest picks,” Athletic prospects writer Scott Wheeler said. “It’s always a bit of a mixed bag in Rounds 2 through 7. But with the picks that matter, his track record is really strong.”Indeed, Brackett and his scouting staff procured Marco Rossi, Jesper Wallstedt, Charlie Stramel, Danila Yurov, Liam Ohgren and Zeev Buium in the first round.But the results are checkered in the middle to late rounds, which, again, will be key for this team in its win-now window.Let’s dig into the numbers a bit, with a big shout-out to Detroit Red Wings beat writer Max Bultman for compiling and analyzing national trends.NHL drafting outside the first round from 2019 to ’25TeamPicks rd 2-72nd rounders100+ NHL GP playersTotal NHL GPTotal NHL ptsAnaheim Ducks48113652225Boston Bruins344126499Buffalo Sabres4771405212Calgary Flames407125132Carolina Hurricanes64142528167Chicago Blackhawks46841033252Colorado Avalanche303230059Columbus Blue Jackets3441393153Dallas Stars354118396Detroit Red Wings5814238690Edmonton Oilers3230403Florida Panthers4551526139Los Angeles Kings401051121435Minnesota Wild3711131781Montreal Canadiens5883706269Nashville Predators4272585244New Jersey Devils456031471New York Islanders367120542New York Rangers4252849234Ottawa Senators41941063288Philadelphia Flyers42102440151Pittsburgh Penguins395010025San Jose Sharks5011016153Seattle Kraken3711136091St. Louis Blues353017123Tampa Bay Lightning474127482Toronto Maple Leafs4053688305Utah Mammoth5384945402Vancouver Canucks4031541147Vegas Golden Knights3342400187Washington Capitals3572603243Winnipeg Jets27505810The Wild were tied for the third-most second-rounders in the NHL from 2019 to ’25, with 11 — a sizable portion of their total picks from Rounds 2 through 7 (37). But only one of those second-rounders, Marat Khusnutdinov (2020), has played 100-plus games in the NHL, and even he only played 73 with Minnesota. Khusnutdinov has now played 95 with the Boston Bruins, as well.In the same span, the Los Angeles Kings have produced an NHL-most five second-rounders who played 100-plus games. The Ottawa Senators, Chicago Blackhawks and Utah Mammoth are at four.Judging by total NHL games played among the second-round picks from 2019 to ’25, the Wild are at 317 (20th in the NHL), with Khusnutdinov boasting more than half of them at 168. Daemon Hunt is next at 45. The Kings, Senators and Blackhawks all have more than 1,000.In those 317 games, Wild second-rounders have scored 81 points (23rd in the NHL), with 49 of them from Khusnutdinov. The Kings’ second-rounders scored an NHL-best 435. Logan Stankoven, taken in the second round by the Dallas Stars in 2021, has 96 points — more than all of the Wild’s picks from Rounds 2 through 7 combined since 2019.Meanwhile, here’s a list of the Wild’s second- and third-round picks from 2019 to 2025, as well as players from later rounds who have played NHL games:Notable Wild picks after Round 1 from 2019 to ’25PlayerYearRndNHL GPNHL PtsVladislav Firstov20192nd00Hunter Jones20192nd00Adam Beckman20193rd233Nikita Nesterenko20196th6117Marshall Warren20196th83Marat Khusnutdinov20202nd16849Ryan O’Rourke20202nd00Daemon Hunt20203rd457Jack Peart20212nd00Caedan Bankier20213rd00Rieger Lorenz20222nd00Hunter Haight20222nd92Michael Milne20223rd10David Spacek20225th20Rasmus Kumpulainen20232nd00Riley Heidt20232nd00Ryder Ritchie20242nd00Theodor Hallquisth20252nd00It’s important context to point out that it’s not uncommon for a non-first-round pick to take four-plus years to reach the NHL. Only six total players picked after Round 1 in the past two drafts have made it to the NHL, all of them from the 2024 draft. If you go back to 2023, that total is just 23 across all 32 teams. There’s time for more of these players to make it to the NHL.But there’s a correlation between hitting on picks in Rounds 2 through 7 and having success — and we’re not just talking about the obvious case of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who won two championships after picking Nikita Kucherov in the second round, Brayden Point in the third and Ondrej Palat in the seventh.The Anaheim Ducks, Mammoth, Kings, Senators and Montreal Canadiens are among the teams that had the most games and points from their non-first-round picks in the 2019 to ’25 span. All five were playoff teams this past season after coming through rebuilds (some of them lengthy ones). There’s also the Washington Capitals, who made quick work of their retool partly due to their drafting.There are players from the list above who could make the post-first-round drafting look better in the years to come. Hunter Haight impressed in his callups this past season as a second-year pro. David Spacek is the team’s top defense prospect, appearing in two games this season. Hunt could be a regular next season.Adam Benak, a fourth-rounder last season, also could end up being a sneaky good risk-reward swing.But there are still many who haven’t quite gotten there.“Haight and Spacek are the two that come to mind as success stories, if you will,” Wheeler said. “They’ve both already played in the NHL. Hunter is going to be a full-time top-12 guy. Spacek has a strong record internationally, and I think he’s going to establish himself as a full-time guy at some point in the next year or two.“I like the Adam Benak pick. There have been some positive ones in there. Obviously, there’s been a lot of talk about the defensemen they’ve taken not panning out. They took a number of well-rounded, competitive defensemen that you expect to fight for a third-pairing role, and a lot of guys who haven’t taken the next step.”It’s also not clear how much of the issue here is from drafting and how much from development.AHL Iowa has struggled in recent years, missing the playoffs three of the past four seasons. Carson Lambos, a first-rounder in 2020, will be playing for his third coach in four years next season, assuming he starts in the minors.“That’s an impossible thing to parse,” Wheeler said. “We do rankings of how teams drafted over the years, and I always get asked, ‘When are you going to do rankings that go over development success and which teams have better success at bringing these players along?’“It’s like what comes first, the chicken or the egg? We never really know if a player would have managed any differently in another program.”Iowa GM Matt Hendricks, entering his third year on the job, knows that winning plays a role in development and that the team has missed the mark in that area. He saw the team playing .600 hockey over the last 30 games this past season as an encouraging sign. But after Greg Cronin left to become a Blues assistant, Hendricks now must go through another coaching search.“It is frustrating,” Hendricks said. “You put things together over the course of the summer, and you’re pretty happy with where you’re at, and then it doesn’t come out and perform the way you want it to or probably the way you expected it to. You want to be a team that, come the middle of April, you’re in a playoff spot.“You want to try and stay as patient as you can, too, and not overreact. But at the end of the day, the results aren’t where we want them to be.”Wheeler cited instances of players getting rushed in the NHL, like goalie Devon Levi with the Buffalo Sabres and Kaapo Kakko with the New York Rangers. Is that part of the issue in Minnesota?“I don’t see that necessarily,” Wheeler said. “It’s hard to be sure about development success going wrong if it’s not the top guy. If it’s Kakko, it’s no excuses. You have to be a high-end player when taken that high (No. 2). With a second-rounder, there’s a ton of built-in excuses. It can be tricky to pinpoint who screwed up, what went wrong and who to blame. Not that these guys are to blame. It’s an inexact science.“You can go through my lists of guys that were too high or too low. The most important part is the first-round picks. You have to get those picks right.”One draft that gets cited often for its misses is 2021. The Wild, like a lot of other teams, passed on Matthew Knies, who ended up going three spots after Minnesota picked Jack Peart at No. 54. Peart, the left-shot defenseman, ended up playing three years at St. Cloud State before turning pro in 2024. Knies, who played in college for the University of Minnesota, already has 160 points in 240 NHL games for the Toronto Maple Leafs.“They took Jack in the range that he was expected to go,” Wheeler said. “He took an unconventional path. People liked him. Average-sized defenseman who was mobile, who could eat pucks, kept his head up, showed an element of skill. He was expected to be more productive in college. It wasn’t like they were taking a (big risk) there.“Knies becoming Knies is a pick that haunts a lot of teams. It’s not like he was taken out of left field. I’m not sure even the Leafs knew he’d become that big and that heavy and that physically imposing.”Again, there’s still time for these numbers to change and players to pan out. But the recent drafting history is something the Wild have to evaluate. It needs to be an area of focus for Brackett’s successor.Brackett did not return a message to comment for this story. But a year ago, when we had him on the “Fellowship of the Rink” podcast, Brackett addressed whether he had any regrets.“Always,” Brackett said. “This is an incredibly humbling business. We’re talking about 17-, 18-year-olds. This is a draft and development, much like MLB. It’s not a plug-and-play into your lineup and your scheme. It can be very humbling. What you thought might happen doesn’t. There’s always times where you love a player and someone picks them two picks in front of you. The opportunity wasn’t there to do it.“There’s always retrospect and looking back and learning from it. I try not to name names on the record. But there are players we look back on and say, ‘Man, we were so close,’ or, ‘We had it this way. Imagine if it was one or two off?’ But if you stay to your core values and stick with your staff and truly believe in the picks you make, you’re going to be thrilled with what you have and stand behind the player you picked and hope they continue to develop the way you envisioned on draft day.”Wild 2026 draft picksRoundPick No.3rd894th1215th (from Sharks)1375th1536th185