Brock Faber, future Wild captain, is the NHL’s most experienced sophomore

Credit: Jun 27, 2024; Las Vegas, Nevada, USA; Brock Faber appears on a red carpet before the start of the 2024 NHL Awards at Fontainebleau Las Vegas. Mandatory Credit: Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports

Brock Faber doesn’t command a room the moment he enters it. Nope, that happens a few seconds before he enters it.

You hear his boisterous, booming voice coming. You’re already peeking at the entry of the conference room by the time the Minnesota Wild’s star defenseman enters, wearing his trademark big spectacles and bigger smile, greeting everyone with the warmth of someone meeting up with his friends.

There’s an immediate magnetism to Faber, 22, who seems more like a movie character than a workhorse NHL defenseman. These guys are supposed to be awe-shucks modest with about 10 rotating cliches programmed into their software by this age, right? Not Faber. The 2023-24 Calder Trophy runner-up isn’t cocky, but he’s confident and self-actualized.

That could simply be the result of Faber’s upbringing. He was raised in a tight-knit family in Maple Grove, Minnesota. His older sister, Paige, was a diehard hockey lover and dominant player who was born with a cognitive disability. She was his inspiration, his backyard rink muse for honing hockey skills, and the reason he never takes his career for granted. He also went from Minnesota born and raised to playing his college hockey at the University of Minnesota and hadn’t yet turned pro when the team that drafted him 45^th overall in 2020, the Los Angeles Kings, traded him to the Wild in summer 2022. Perhaps you’re always out of your shell if you never retreated into it because you’ve played virtually your whole career at home, living out your dreams.

That’s one possible explanation for why Faber carries himself so assuredly. The other is that he lived two or three years worth of experience in his rookie season. Jared Spurgeon, the Wild’s captain and top right-shot defenseman, only made it through 16 games in 2023-24 because of hip and back injuries. That pressed Faber into literally the biggest workload for any NHL rookie since statisticians began tracking ice time in 1997-98. He set NHL rookie records for average TOI (24:58) and total minutes played (2047:53). Forced to play top-pair assignments against the other teams’ best forwards right away, Faber sponged up valuable lessons.

“I feel like I’ve learned a lot about how hard it is to defend,” he told a small group of reporters at the NHL Player Media Tour in Las Vegas earlier this month. “I come in with the Wild, and my strong suit is always how I defended and played on that side of the ice, and it’s a little different now, right? It’s a lot harder to defend these guys. And it’s stuff you can’t really learn in the off-season. Like, you can’t learn how to take a 2-on-1 against Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. When you’re thrown into the fire, that’s how you learn. And when you make mistakes, that’s how you learn.”

Faber sat in the 91^st percentile of the NHL in quality of competition last season. On a Wild team that fell short of making the playoffs, he was impressive in that he helped them pretty much break even at 5-on-5 when he was out there. They had a +1 goal differential and -5 chance differential with Faber on the ice. Without him: a minus-6 goal differential and +36 chance differential. Translation: he helped keep them in the fight by cancelling out opponents’ top lines and setting them up to win the easier matchups. That said, he also slowly found his footing as an offensive threat. He had one goal and eight points through 20 games before putting up seven goals and 39 points in his final 62 games. Spurgeon, who, unfortunately, got to watch a lot of Faber while recovering from hip surgery, was impressed by Faber’s offensive awakening.

“The first couple [games] you’re always just kind of worried – not worried, but more focused on the defensive end of your game,” Spurgeon told Daily Faceoff over the phone this week. “And you can just see him slowly getting that confidence in the offensive part of his game and being able to take over the game on both ends of the ice. Not only from an offensive [numbers] standpoint, but offensive with the way he reads the play. And he’s such a great skater. He can get up the ice and has a great shot as well. So he has all the intangibles there.”

Faber’s play driving did dip a bit as he reached the dog days of the season. But it happened for a forgivable reason that amounted to just one more bit of experience he absorbed on the fly in Year 1: he was playing hurt. He fought through a pair of cracked ribs for the final two months of the season and still played all 82 games. He didn’t have to on a team that got eliminated from playoff contention almost two weeks before the season ended, but it was important to him.

“People talked about, ‘Oh, they should have shut him down when they were out of the playoffs,’ and I was the one who said no,” Faber said. “Obviously it was my decision and the reasoning behind it was, I feel like it’s important as a young player in this league, as a young teammate, as a teammate with this team who’s trying to [win] a Stanley Cup someday, whether you’re hurt Game 75 and you’re out of the playoffs, or it’s Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, you’re going to show up the same way.

“That’s how I was raised, that’s what I always believed in, and that’s what I told them. I was like, ‘I’m happy to play through this, I want to play through this, I don’t want to sit out, that’s the last thing I want to do for my teammates.”

To be clear: the Wild weren’t going to put Faber in jeopardy. He was medically cleared on the grounds that the ribs were fractured but not fully broken and thus not a threat to puncture a lung. But the injury was extremely painful to play through, affecting his breathing, and it was Faber’s choice to push through it.

The way he talks about it, it’s like listening to a captain give a dressing room speech. Correction: future captain. Spurgeon, 35, has held the honor since 2020-21 and is signed for three more seasons. And Faber immediately heaps praise on Spurgeon when any mention of captaincy comes up. But the Wild just extended their hometown hero on an eight-year deal playing $8.5 million annually for a reason. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before he wears the C.

Even Spurgeon agrees. He’s a mentor to Faber but says he likes to bounce ideas off Faber, too. And Spurgeon sees what Faber can represent for the franchise long term.

“Yeah, for sure, just the way he carries himself and how mature he is for only playing one year and just the way he conducts himself, you can definitely see that he’s a very well-spoken guy and treats people with the utmost respect as well,” Spurgeon said. “He’s just very approachable but a very genuine guy and he has something special about him on the ice and off the ice as well.”

Quite the impression Faber has made after just one full season in the NHL. What will the followup give us? Will he avoid the sophomore slump? He’s not particularly worried about it because, the way he sees it, people base that definition off scoring statistics. He believes he’ll avoid a sophomore slump as long as he’s doing his primary job, which is to thwart the other teams’ best players.

“How I look at it is, the way I want to play the game…I want to affect the game as much if I had a hat-trick or if I didn’t have any goals but I was a great defender, I broke the puck out great, I did things like that,” he said. “I look at it a little deeper than that.”

Spoken like 22-year-old greybeard who played the most minutes of any rookie ever last year – with the wisdom of a future captain.

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Brock Faber, future Wild captain, is the NHL’s most experienced sophomore

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