Gabriel Landeskog will be out the entire 2023-24 season for the Colorado Avalanche after the forward has a cartilage transplant in his right knee Wednesday.
The Avalanche captain missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs and all this season following knee surgery in October. At the time, Landeskog was expected to be sidelined 12 weeks. He has not played since getting an assist to help the Colorado win the Stanley Cup with a 2-1 victory against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 6 of the 2022 Stanley Cup Final on June 26.
“I still thought I’d be fine, ready to go after the summer,” Landeskog said before the Avalanche defeated the Winnipeg Jets 4-2 on April 13. “Obviously a very short summer. I realized fairly quickly that things had gotten worse. … I thought I was going to be able to play the second half of the season. We’ve given it our best shot and it just hasn’t worked out. Moving forward we continue to explore options, but I felt like this was the decision I had to make at this point for everybody involved and for my teammates and myself.”
Landeskog also had knee surgery March 21, 2022. He missed 23 games but came back to help Colorado win the Cup with 22 points (11 goals, 11 assists) and a team-high plus-15 in 20 playoff games. He had surgery on his quad during the 2020 postseason.
“The timeline goes back to the bubble 2020,” he said. “Kind of a freak accident that happens there. Never had any knee issues before that. One thing led to the next and it just sort of progressively got worse over that next year. Start of [last] season it started bugging me on a daily basis. It got worse and worse up until the point that we got the first surgery. At that point I didn’t really realize the complexity of the injury and how one injury can … obviously it compensates.”
Landeskog had said he was certain he’d play again.
“I’m confident in that,” he said. “When? I don’t know. You try and take it one step at a time. This is no different than going into a new season, essentially. Where you start with training camp and you go from there. This is the same thing. I’m trying not to look too far ahead. But I’m confident, and like I said, we’ll get through this.”
The 30-year-old has 571 points (248 goals, 323 assists) in 738 regular-season games, all with Colorado, and 67 points (27 goals, 40 assists) in 69 playoff games.
The Avalanche (50-24-7) lost the 2023 Western Conference First Round in seven games to the Seattle Kraken.
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