ST. PAUL, Minn. — Marcus Foligno was a bit confused, but his confusion should tell you just how good Brock Faber has been this season.
After Tuesday’s win over the Washington Capitals, one of the Minnesota Wild’s most respected veterans and a player who has a good pulse on the NHL was asked where he thought his rookie teammate should be in the Calder Trophy conversation a little more than halfway through the season.
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Foligno answered, “Well, if not this year, he’s going to be in there for the future every year.”
When reminded the Calder Trophy is for Rookie of the Year and Faber won’t be eligible “every year,” Foligno laughed, realizing he thought the question referred to the Norris Trophy — the award that goes annually to the league’s best defenseman.
And, hey, if you look at Faber’s underlying defensive metrics and fast-evolving offensive numbers, you could see why Foligno made the mistake.
But first things first: the Calder, especially since the door is suddenly widening for Faber with word that front-runner Connor Bedard will miss at least another six weeks with a broken jaw.
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Calder Trophy midseason ranking: Can Brock Faber challenge Connor Bedard for No. 1?
Faber is tied with teammate Marco Rossi and leads all rookie defensemen with 28 points in 47 games. To be fair, that’s in eight more games than Bedard’s played and is five fewer points than the Blackhawks’ young star and 2023 No. 1 pick has.
But Faber leads all rookies in average ice time at 24 minutes and 44 seconds a game, which ranks 11th in the league.
He is tied for fifth on the Wild in scoring, first among defensemen. He also leads the team in average and total ice time – 1,162 minutes, 26 seconds, which is more than 200 minutes ahead of the next closest, center Joel Eriksson Ek. He is second behind Jake Middleton, his partner for a chunk of the season and somebody who raves about Faber every chance he gets, with 93 blocked shots.
Digging deeper, according to Dom Luszczyszyn’s “net rating” catch-all stat, Faber ranks 24th among defensemen at plus-4.4 (which prorates to plus-8 for the season), with a full-season forecast also of plus-8. Much of that has to do with his five-on-five play.
The Wild have earned 51.71 percent of the five-on-five expected goal share in his minutes, per Natural Stat Trick, and his two-way play has been influential on that.
The Wild are generating 0.15 more expected goals per 60 in Faber’s minutes, relative to his teammates. The only Minnesota defender to help boost the team’s actual and expected goal generation more than Faber is Jared Spurgeon. While the team’s recent stretch has been a challenge for both Faber and his teammates defensively, he’s still been a positive influence on the team’s expected and actual goal suppression on the season as a whole.
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And Faber has done all of this at 21 years of age, fresh off the University of Minnesota’s ice, having just played two regular-season NHL games and six playoff games last season (he wasn’t on the ice for a goal against in those eight games) and with the Wild’s top two defensemen — Spurgeon and Jonas Brodin — having missed 31 games and 17 games, respectively.
Frankly, where would the Wild be this season without Faber?
“He is a keeper,” Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman said. “Comparable to (Norris Trophy winner) Adam Fox and Spurgeon. He plays with great confidence.”
Remember, as negative as things have been for the Wild this month, they have won four of their past five games and three in a row. If they defeat the Nashville Predators on Thursday night, they’ll pull within two points of Nashville for the final wild-card spot in the West.
And naturally during this five-game stretch, Faber has a franchise rookie-defenseman record five-game point streak, including a three-point game at the Florida Panthers and a two-point game at the Carolina Hurricanes. The three points against the Panthers came on the Wild’s five-power-play-goal night, which is quite impressive since Faber didn’t start playing the power play until late November and didn’t play on the power play in college and barely did for USA Hockey, either.
“We’ve tried to push him to be able to use his skating and find ways to use his skating as offensive skills,” coach John Hynes said. “He’s been a factor, at least as long as I’ve been here from an offensive perspective, but it’s nice to see him be able to put something in the back of the net too where he generates looks and also gets rewarded for it.”
It’s often said that it takes an NHL defenseman 200 games to find his footing.
What Faber’s doing is frankly remarkable and worthy of capturing the attention of Professional Hockey Writers’ Association voters’ attention come April.
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And if point production is a necessary prerequisite to win the hardware over Faber’s solid play defensively, well, he’s on pace for 49 points. The only active defensemen in the NHL who recorded more during their rookie years were the Vancouver Canucks’ Quinn Hughes (53 points), Detroit Red Wings’ Moritz Seider (50) and Colorado Avalanche’s Cale Makar (50). Seider and Makar won the Calder. The only reason why Hughes didn’t was bad timing: His rookie year was the same as Makar’s.
Is the Calder Trophy in Brock Faber's future? 🤔@mnwild | #mnwild pic.twitter.com/SCQrN3ZpY8
— NHL Network (@NHLNetwork) January 24, 2024
Nick Fohr, head coach of the U.S. National Team Development Program Under-18 team and previously an assistant and associate coach for 11 years, worked with NHL defensemen like Faber, Hughes, Zach Werenski, Charlie McAvoy, Noah Hanifin and Jake Sanderson. He’s impressed with how Faber has been able to step right into an NHL lineup and be as effective as he is.
“Initially for these guys to step in, they can play off adrenaline and just kind of the ‘cool factor’ of being the NHL,” Fohr said. “But the focus, the compete that it takes to be effective shift after shift after shift for 24 and a half minutes a night, it’s hard for young people to do that for 82 games. It takes a maturation process for them to get to the point where they could do that every night for that long. And, who knows, maybe we’ll see with Brock that it slides a little bit. That’s still yet to be determined, right? But right now he’s doing an unreal job.”
Considering the workload Faber has been asked to take on with the team’s struggles and mounting injuries, the rookie’s performance is even more impressive.
“For how young (Faber) is — and I know the whole youth thing is getting old now; so many of these young guys are insane when they come into this league now — but the game management he has is something you see out of a veteran,” Foligno said. “And just his athletic stature. I mean, that guy’s built like a linebacker, so it’s insane.”
Plain and simple, Foligno called Faber “the real deal” and somebody who should be right there in the Bedard conversation for the Calder.
“I’d say defenseman as a young guy in the NHL is a really hard position to play,” Hynes said. “And not only is it a hard position to play, but with the injuries, he’s been put in situations where he’s got to be a top-pair D and play those (big) minutes and play that type of competition. His effectiveness, his consistency level, has been really impressive as it goes on. So I think the way that he’s played and the situations he’s played in, he’s certainly deserving of that type of talk.”
Faber, as Wild fans have learned this season, is also one of the most accountable players around. If he goofs up, he’s often sitting at his stall in the locker room postgame ready and willing to talk about it.
After Tuesday’s win over the Caps, a game in which Faber wasn’t on the ice for an even-strength shot off the rush in the first 35 minutes, Faber was reluctant to accept credit for his point production since late November but quick to offer up that his defensive game has slipped recently.
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“I still know that I have to build on my consistency in my decision-making in the D-zone, which you know, I’ve been far from perfect defensively the past this month,” Faber said. “I’m just (trying) to find that happy medium where I’m jumping in plays, where I’m skating with the puck on my stick a lot of the game but still making smart, solid, strong decisions. Not turning pucks over, not ending up with pucks in the back of the net when I’m on the ice.”
Hynes loves Faber’s genuine nature of being accountable, saying “real self-assessment” is one of the biggest challenges for young players.
“That mindset and the personality that Brock has, that’s allowed him to get better as this year’s gone on and to be able to rebound from some tough situations but also more, often than not, be a real positive impact and be real consistent.”
Whether this ends this season with the Calder or in future years with the Norris, Fohr feels the Wild have a defenseman who will be in their lineup playing at a high level for more than a decade.
“He has the potential to be one of the elite defensemen in the NHL,” Fohr said.
As for this season, if you hadn’t guessed, Faber isn’t worrying about any Calder talk.
“I care more about winning games, obviously, so whatever I can do to help the team win is what I want to do,” Faber said. “Calder and all that, I really just try and stay focused on my game, building that consistency in my game and playing as best I can for these guys.”
This is precisely why Foligno calls him “a future leader of this team.”
“And we want him to get that Calder Trophy,” Foligno said, before adding with perfect comedic timing, “and, if not the Norris.”
Shayna Goldman contributed to this report.
(Top photo: Nick Wosika / USA Today)