Landeskog to miss the postseason

The Colorado Avalanche announced Thursday afternoon that captain Gabriel Landeskog will miss the Stanley Cup Playoffs through injury. In turn, he will miss the entirety of the 2022-23 season.

His knee injury has ultimately become too much to handle. It will hurt the Avs’ chances of repeating as Stanley Cup champions without their captain on the ice.

Landeskog started skating back in February after suffering a few setbacks. While he started off slow, he had gotten faster and better over the last month and a half as he eyed a return to the ice. This was only demonstrated further when he joined the team on their most recent road trip to California.

However, he had not been skating this week and was spotted at today’s morning skate on the bench doing some puck work but not actually on the ice. This news seems to suggest why that’s the case.

While there have been complaints about Joe Sakic and Chris MacFarland not utilizing his $7M contract for LTIR at the trade deadline, the Avs didn’t have much of a chance to make use of the extra cap space. He was still theoretically going to come back from injury, and there were little to no assets to be moved to bring in a top-six forward with scoring capabilities, a physical presence, and the ability to be a fill-in captain.

There is no replacing Landeskog as captain of this team. It’s simply not possible.

The Avalanche captain will miss the entire season and look to rest up for the start of the 2023-24 season, so long as his knee allows him to. He’ll likely still be around the team during this postseason run but in an off-ice manner.

At this point, we can only hope he can fully recover to live a healthy life off the ice. Getting him back on the ice would be an added bonus. We wish the best to Gabriel Landeskog and his family in his recovery and hope to see him live a healthy life with the possibility of returning to on-ice action in the 23-24 season.