The Colorado Avalanche had the pleasure of having Gabriel Landeskog return in the middle of their first-round playoff series against the Dallas Stars. It was his first action with the team in over three years. Though there’s clear optimism that Landeskog is past his knee injury, it’s fair to question or worry about his future.
Fans are going to love general manager Chris MacFarland’s latest update on Landeskog.
"”I think the fact that we can count on Gabe—number one, he’s a massive part of our team. So that’s super exciting that we can look at that $7 million and go, there’s an expectation that he’s going to have a normal summer and training camp and be ready to roll from game 1. So that’s huge for us in terms of how we attack the next few days because the last few years, it’s been, how do we attack this and get out of it? So, it’s a challenge.”"Avalanche GM Chris MacFarland
The big thing to focus on here is that MacFarland hints at the comfort level of the team regarding Landeskog’s future. If everything goes as planned, the Avalanche captain’s knee injury is either strictly still on a great path, or perhaps a non-issue at this point in time.
Part of the general manager’s job is to build a team under the league’s salary cap restrictions and with Landeskog, it was complicated at times because there were so many ups and downs throughout the whole process. ‘Could he come back?’ ‘Will we still have to wait?’ Those were questions that fans were asking throughout this whole situation throughout the past couple of years. Of course, we got to find out through Landeskog’s docu-series about his recovery and how tough it was on him in many different ways, including physically and mentally.
Landeskog wanted to be with his teammates through the highs and the lows. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always possible, as schedules clashed. He couldn’t always be there for his teammates as their captain so they had to figure things out on their own a lot of the time.
Now, the expectation is that Landeskog and his $7 million are going to be a part of this team going forward. Having that confidence is a great place to start in terms of building around the team’s stars. Colorado made a trade on Friday, sending Charlie Coyle and Miles Wood to the Columbus Blue Jackets, freeing up cap space. The Avalanche used to have the very least amount of cap space in the league with $1.2 million, but following that trade, they sit with $8.95 million, with several moves still to come.