Faber Is Worth Every Dollar. That's Exactly the Problem.

Brock Faber logged 24.5 minutes of ice time per game last season — more than any other player on this roster, more than Kaprizov, more than anyone Minnesota iced. He did it as a young defenseman still ascending, posting a plus-12 rating while quarterbacking a blue line that was perpetually short-handed by injury. EA Sports just ranked him alongside Cale Makar. The video game got it right. And that's where Bill Guerin's headache begins.

I wrote last week that Makar's $163.2 million extension set the price for elite defensemen — that Minnesota would eventually have to stare at that number and decide what it means for Faber. What I didn't fully reckon with then is how quickly "eventually" is becoming "now." Guerin is already publicly uncertain about Quinn Hughes — "who knows what he's going to want," the GM said on September 1st — and Hughes is the more pressing contract emergency, entering his final year. But the Hughes negotiation and the Faber negotiation are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing two different jerseys, and the Makar deal just made both of them more expensive to solve.

Here's the structural bind: Faber's numbers last season — 28 points in 49 games, that workload, that plus-12 — are the production of a player who will command serious money precisely because of how indispensable he already is. He's not a project. He's not a bet on upside. He's a proven, high-minutes defenseman who is getting better. The market for that player, post-Makar, is not kind to cap-constrained teams. And Minnesota, whatever its ambitions, is a team carrying real roster fragility: an offense that ran almost entirely through Kaprizov and Boldy, a goaltending situation in genuine crisis with Gustavsson now confirmed to miss the start of the 2026-27 season, and a blue line that leaned on Faber so heavily last year that the workload itself becomes an argument for paying him before he has more leverage, not less.

The counterargument — and it's real — is that Guerin has shown he can move. The Coleman and Maatta acquisition from Calgary, the front office reinforcement with Dan MacKinnon, the entry-level goaltending prospect signed in July: this is not an organization standing still. But none of those moves address the core tension, which is that Minnesota needs Faber locked in long-term, needs Hughes resolved, and is doing both negotiations in a market that Makar just repriced upward. You can acquire depth all offseason. You cannot acquire another Faber.

My read is that the longer this drags, the worse the math gets for Minnesota. Faber's value is only going up. The Makar deal is the new floor for how agents will frame conversations about elite young defensemen, and Faber's representation will use every word of it. Guerin knows this — his public caution around Hughes signals a front office that understands the stakes and is not eager to overpay in a moment of panic. That discipline is admirable. But discipline and urgency are not mutually exclusive, and right now the calendar is winning. Training camp is weeks away, Gustavsson won't be there, and Minnesota's most important long-term asset is skating into another season without a deal. The number is getting harder. Waiting doesn't make it easier.