Brock Faber has already pushed well past what most people thought was possible when the Wild brought him in back in 2022. Minnesota knew it was getting a high-end defensive prospect with the second-round pick, but not many scouts would have projected him as a true franchise pillar.
His stock keeps climbing. NHL.com just slotted him 14th among NHL defensemen in its annual positional rankings, a jump from 20th a year ago.
That rise makes the next question unavoidable: is there another level left?
To answer that, last season has to be split in two, because Faber’s year looked very different before and after the Quinn Hughes trade. In the 32 games before Hughes arrived, Faber led Minnesota defensemen in ice time at 24:21 per night, ahead of Jonas Brodin’s 22:04.
The results were uneven. He put up six goals and nine assists for 15 points, and at five-on-five the Wild were outscored 22-21 with him on the ice.
His expected goals percentage in that stretch sat at 47.99%.
Once Hughes entered the picture, everything changed for Faber. Over 49 games, he posted nine goals and 27 assists for 36 points, and his 5-on-5 expected goals percentage jumped to 54.69%.
It would be easy to say Hughes did all the heavy lifting, but that misses the point. Faber was part of the equation, and his job was to be the ideal complement to one of the best players in the world.
There are reasons to believe Faber can keep producing. He’s 24 this season, which puts him right in the stretch where defensemen often start to find their most productive years.
Durability has also been a calling card. He has played at least 78 games in each of his three NHL seasons.
Hughes has been reliable too, skating in at least 74 games in four of his last five seasons. If both stay healthy, the pairing should have plenty of runway.
The flip side is that the league now has a full offseason to study that duo. Teams will come in with a plan for them this time.
Even so, Hughes has been one of the NHL’s most productive blueliners for a while now, with more than 70 points in four straight seasons. That makes it hard to picture a scenario where he and Faber aren’t dangerous offensively.
The area where Faber can still sharpen his game is consistency. Across his three seasons, there have been stretches when his play slips.
He had a rough second half as a rookie after an injury, then opened last season slowly. Some of that ties back to health or the kind of workload he’s carried at a young age, but a steadier full season would be a clear step forward.
His value, though, goes beyond the scoresheet. Faber is a two-way defenseman and one of the league’s premier minute-munchers, the type of player whose impact is tied closely to team results because he’s on the ice so much.
That’s part of why his rise has tracked with Minnesota’s improvement. The Wild have gotten better every season Faber has been on the roster.
He’s also continued to build his profile internationally. Over the last two years, he formed a strong partnership with Jaccob Slavin at the inaugural 4-nations faceoff in 2025, then played a key role for the USA in its 2026 Olympic Gold Medal run.
Those events mattered. They showed he could handle major responsibility against the best players in the world. This year’s hockey calendar doesn’t offer another signature international stage, so Faber won’t get that same kind of spotlight.
For now, he’s already cleared the bar most people set for him. The real question is whether he can keep climbing. The next season will say a lot about that, because to keep moving forward, Faber will need another statistical peak and a Wild team that keeps winning at a higher level.
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Jet Greaves and Spencer Knight are also part of that next group, which makes this more than a single-player watch for teams tracking the position. For Minnesota, the appeal is obvious: if Wallstedt takes the next step, he can move from promising prospect to legitimate contender in a league that never stops searching for the next elite goalie. The challenge is that the goalie landscape can change quickly, and the players pushing toward that top tier still have to prove they can sustain it when the spotlight gets brighter. [Read more 🡒]