It’s the time we’ve all been waiting for, Colorado Avalanche fans! The return of Gabriel Landeskog is inching closer by the hour. After three full seasons of recovering from a horrific injury, Landeskog will be returning to the team in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Dallas Stars.
While there was chatter about him missing the first two playoff games against Dallas, there’s no longer question.
The team announced his activation on X Monday afternoon, roughly six hours prior to their 9:30pm(ish) ET puck drop. The move comes 1,030 days after he played his most recent NHL game, hoisting the Stanley Cup after defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2022.
Landeskog had been doing his best to get back from this injury, even putting recovery off until after the Stanley Cup Playoffs were over with in 2022, no matter the outcome. You talk about players going out on top, and while his exit from the Avalanche for three years wasn’t exactly like that, it’s cool to have a Stanley Cup on your resumé.
He was determined for all of these years to get back into hockey shape and even spent two games with the Colorado Eagles, roughly 15 minutes each of those games. When he was able to accomplish that, I felt pretty confident that he would be able to make a return to the NHL this postseason. Though the AHL is a much slower game than the NHL, it was just refreshing to see him take more contact than he had taken in practices with the Avalanche, and still be good to go.
It will be interesting to see how much ice time head coach Jared Bednar gives Landeskog and where on their lineup the put him. On one hand, it would seem likely that Bednar puts him on the third or fourth line to get reacclimated to the speed of the game again. On the other hand, if he’s deemed good to go and if he himself feels good enough, why not put him on the second line? If he’s truly ready, that second line could be epic.
Just like they did for Alexander Ovechkin when he broke Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goal record, I think that we’ll probably see a lot of Dallas Stars players having a chat with Landeskog either during or after the game. He’s well-respected across the league and even in the AHL, where one of the players he faced in his two games there told him it was great to have him back.
Get ready for a lot of emotion tonight, Avalanche Faithful. It’s going to be incredible!