Colorado Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog (Credit: IMAGN)

The Colorado Avalanche have been without captain Gabriel Landeskog for over two full seasons. He last played in June 2022, leading his team to defeat the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 6 of the 2022 Stanley Cup Final and bring the Stanley Cup back to Colorado for the first time since 2001.

Landeskog, who signed an eight-year, $56M deal with the team in 2021, underwent arthroscopic knee surgery in October 2022, and while it seemed he would only miss the first 12 weeks of the subsequent season, he hasn’t played since. He had to undergo surgery a second time, this time for a cartilage transplant.

But Landeskog has no thoughts on hanging up the skates anytime soon. He recently responded to a fan’s retirement call on social media.

“Is it though?” he quipped.

Gabriel Landeskog has gone under the knife several times now

Following the announcement in May of 2023 that he would need cartilage transplant surgery, he indicated that he felt good about his prospects of playing again, an opinion he said was shared by medical experts.

“Everybody I’ve talked to and the medical experts I’ve consulted with have shared that faith with me as well,” Landeskog said. “I feel good about it.”

Orthopedic surgeon Brian Schulz, also a physician with the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks, explained a general perspective in layperson’s terms of the operation that the Avalanche captain underwent.

“If you imagine a pothole in a road. That’s a lot of time what these cartilage injuries are: The cartilage around it is OK, but there’s an area where there’s little or no cartilage and that continues to cause pain, swelling and the inability to play or participate in the activities you want to play in,” said Schulz. “The cartilage transplant is, you try to fill that void with cartilage.”

“Small studies have shown pretty good success in return to play in high-level athletes,” Schulz adds. “There are not a lot of professional athletes who have had this procedure, to where you can scale and do a study on only professional athletes, but there’s a track record there that there’s a good chance he can do well.”

Gabriel Landeskog has played in 738 career NHL games, all with the Avalanche, who selected him with the second overall pick in the 2011 NHL Draft. The Swedish left winger tallied 248 goals and 323 assists while adding another 27 goals and 40 assists in 69 postseason games.