The Colorado Avalanche have played seven games so far in the 2025-26 season, coming away with five wins and two overtime losses, including Tuesday evening against the Utah Mammoth, where they forced overtime and came away with a point despite the loss. Captain Gabriel Landeskog scored a goal, but it unfortunately did not count. The rule caused a lot of controversy and debate and fans were livid.
So, through those first seven games, Landeskog’s official stat line is zero goals on nine shots, and two assists. He has averaged a time on ice of 14:40 over that timeframe, which ranks 12th on the team. His line mates, Brock Nelson and Valeri Nichushkin, have quite a bit more ice time with 19:30 and 16:23 respectively.
As of Wednesday, October 22, 2025, it has officially been 1,220 days since Landeskog scored his most recent regular season goal.
Although fans would be thrilled to see the captain score that long-awaited goal, they should be thrilled with the effort that Landeskog has put forward. Landeskog doesn’t appear to fear any sort of contact at this point. If I were to guess, it must be a lot more comfortable for him the more he plays. I’ve noticed several times when he was fighting for the puck and fell down but got right back up. He wants that contact. He wants to also dish out contact. It’s clear that he has missed the sport and his teammates.
Landeskog has shown a lot of encouraging things in his return, and his will to get better each game is really showing. Once he officially gets that first goal, that monkey will get off of his back. I’m sure that the Avalanche and head coach Jared Bednar aren’t worried about that first goal, but it will be awesome once he finally gets it out of the way. He has provided a lot more outside of the score sheet, which is crucial in hockey, so we can’t complain too much.
While he has had experience playing alongside Nichushkin, he has very little with Brock Nelson, who is manning the center position on that same second line. The thing about chemistry is that it takes time. There’s no telling when things will click and become more consistent. One thing the Avalanche want to stress is depth scoring and while the third and fourth lines are technically deemed the depth, we can stash Landeskog in that category, too, until he starts scoring on a somewhat-regular basis.
Nichushkin is probably the biggest threat on that second line, with his big frame and lethal shot, but Landeskog is no slouch. He’s still a top player who teams need to scout against because there isn’t a ton of recent film on him, so what we saw of him prior to the Stanley Cup win, we might see a different style of player. That’s one of the biggest challenges for opponents. He also has shown recently that he’s a very physical player, so that could affect opposing matchups, creating challenges.
Landeskog will also get more opportunities to showcase his scoring ability when he’s on the ice during power plays. With a new power play system inserted this season by a new coach, it’s certainly possible that the Avalanche figure out ways to generate enough traffic in front of the net on the man-advantage. The team currently ranks 30th in the league with a power play percentage of 11.5%.
Colorado has the most amount of shots of any team in the entire league with 233 in eight games. However, they have a shooting percentage of just 10.3%, which ranks 18th. The team needs to find more ways to get Landeskog in position to score. While we wait for the captain’s first goal of the 2025-26 season, it will arrive at some point. Once he starts getting on a hot streak, we should see a lot more wins heading to Colorado on their quest for the Stanley Cup Final.