As Brock Faber’s stellar play continues for Wild, the Calder Trophy door opens —

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.

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.

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.

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…