It’s a small sample size, to be sure.

In a previously normal 82-game campaign, Tuesday night’s game in Buffalo, N.Y., would have been the Minnesota Wild’s first of the season. But in the new 84-game world of the NHL, there is a track record established.

After the devastating loss of star defenseman Brock Faber in the Wild’s final exhibition game — for how long, we still have no concrete idea — there was an immediate notion that it would take six defensemen, not just one or two, to fill the void left in Faber’s absence.

Two games into the season, the Wild shuffled off to Buffalo having allowed just two goals thanks in part to a combination of excellent goaltending from Jesper Wallstedt and a defensive corps determined to work as a group to fill that notable absence.

“I don’t think it’s a one-guy job. I think we’ve done a lot of good things,” Wild defenseman Olli Maatta said this week. “Something you can’t do in the summer is the defensive partner game. I think it’s hard to replicate. So training camp was really good for us.

“In the early part of the season, there’s a lot of things you’re trying to get back in place, and I think the first two games we’ve done a pretty good job.”

Maatta, who came here in a July trade with Calgary, began his career with a Stanley Cup in Pittsburgh but has bounced around in recent years. Last season he spent 22 games in Utah and 21 with the Flames. From Finland, he has been successfully paired with Swedish veteran Jonas Brodin in the early going.

Maatta joked that he wishes he had taken things a bit more seriously when he studied Swedish for three years in high school, but he and Brodin can communicate in English just fine.

“He’s obviously a great skater, and he plays the game with his strength and defends really well with the gaps and everything,” Maatta said of Brodin, who missed a good chunk of the playoffs last season due to injury — a big blow to the Wild in Round 2. “He’s very hard to play against the other way. He has been around for a long time, so he knows how the game’s played and all the little things.”

The top defensive pair of Quinn Hughes and Jared Spurgeon has found its footing right away, as well. Nobody talks with any seriousness about ways to replace Faber’s impact on Minnesota’s defensive game. But together, the sextet of Hughes, Spurgeon, Brodin, Maatta, Daemon Hunt and Zach Bogosian, playing within the system laid out for them, has found ways to thrive.

“I think just in general, the system that we play in, we have the freedom to jump up when we do,” said Spurgeon, the Wild captain who scored his first goal of the season versus Boston. “But obviously, you’re not going to replace a guy like Brock. He’s a special player with the way he skates and reads the game, and just the talents in general. The chemistry him and Quinn have is something special.

“But as a group, I think we’re just playing a good, solid game right now, and we continue to build that.”

For Hughes, the adjustment to Faber’s absence brings him back to last season, when he saw new teammate after new teammate step up to fill voids.

“Honestly, it’s played out exactly how I thought it would. We have a really good team,” Hughes said after the home opener win over Boston. “Who was it last year? I think at one point we were missing (Joel) Eriksson Ek, (Marcus Johansson) and Brodin all on one trip and we…got five out of six points.

“So I just think we just have a good team. Of course, when we’re trying to play serious hockey, we will need Brock, and we will need him throughout the year. I don’t know what his timetable or return is but, anytime you miss him, you feel it. But also, thankful for the depth that we do have.”

As the Wild’s first extended road trip of the season began, that depth was sure to be tested.