Colorado Avalanche Captain Gabriel Landeskog Earns 2nd Star Honors

The Colorado Avalanche’s captain, Gabriel Landeskog, has earned Second Star honors from the NHL for his incredible play this week.

Colorado Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog has been playing some of the best hockey of his career in the last few weeks. Things are going his way, and he’s putting up points.

The NHL has taken notice. Landeskog earned 3 goals and 6 assists for 9 points in 4 games played last week. Those numbers are good for first in the NHL. The Avs have gone 2-1-1 in that span.

Those numbers have earned Landeskog Second Star of the Week honors. (The first star wen to Mika Zibanejad, who had seven goals in three games.)

The team is struggling with injuries right now, as we all know. Indeed, the Avalanche have recalled Martin Kaut because some of the players are “banged up.” Man, it’s tough to be at Game 69 of the season with so many players banged up and outright injured.

However, the captain is stepping up as any good captain would. There’s no question that his play of the last week have helped Colorado to that 2-1-1 record despite all the injuries.

Indeed, Landeskog’s leadership has been on display all season. Between his leadership and Nathan MacKinnon’s wizardry (35 goals and 58 points), the Avalanche have been able to limp along to a 41-19-8 record.

I say limp along because they’ve been injured for so much of the season. Pundits and fans alike were saying the Avalanche were “getting injuries out of the way early” when we had so many guys out at the beginning of the season.

Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. Just because we had so many injuries early doesn’t mean we’re not going to have some later in the season. In fact, I daresay early injuries may lead to later injuries if a player rushes back to soon or guys play beyond their level for too long to compensate.

Well, Landeskog isn’t playing beyond his level. He’s playing right where you’d want to see your captain at. On the season he has 21 goals and 21 assists for 42 points in 52 games.

He’s slowly climbing up the leading scorers ranks. He started out the week at #6 on the team. He overtook first Nazem Kadri and them Mikko Rantanen so that he’s #4 for scorers. Besides, obviously, MacKinnon, only Andre Burakovsky (45 points) and Cale Makar (47 points) are ahead.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Landeskog overtake Burakovsky within the next few games.

Anyway, the Colorado Avalanche are playing tonight. Colorado didn’t hold a morning skate since they’re on the second game of a back-to-back. So, we don’t know who’s potentially injured or which goalie will start.

But we do know we’ll have our Viking captain leading the charge against the LA Kings.