Some surprising news from the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday as head coach Jared Bednar announced that team captain Gabriel Landeskog will be undergoing knee surgery on Monday and will be sidelined indefinitely. There is currently no timetable for his return.
He played 18 minutes in Colorado’s most recent game, a 2-0 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday night.
In 51 games this season for the Avalanche he has scored 30 goals and 29 assists for 59 total points.
The Avalanche are also expected to be without defenseman Sam Girard for the next four weeks.
It continues what has been a pretty unbelievable season for the Avalanche on the injury front as they have spent a significant portion of the season playing without some of their top players. Landeskog, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen, J.T. Compher, Pavel Francouz, Devon Toews, Alex Newhook, and Bowen Byram have all missed multiple games (some a significant number of games) due to injury. Now Landeskog is set to miss even more along with Girard.
Despite all of that the Avalanche have still been the best team in the league and in strong contention for the Presidents’ Trophy. Since starting the season 4-5-1 in their first 10 games they have gone 37-8-4 since then.
Now there is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, which is what Landeskog’s injurry might do to the Avalanche’s trade deadline plans. Assuming he goes on LTIR and is sidelined for an extended period of time (perhaps, even, for the remainder of the regular season) it could really impact their ability to add before the NHL trade deadline which is just a little more than a week away.
The Avalanche have been linked to Philadelphia Flyers forward Claude Giroux but would need to find a way to fit him under the salary cap. Philadelphia could always retain some salary, but an LTIR stop for Landeskog would also help. The salary cap goes away in the Stanley Cup Playoffs so everything would work for them in that case.
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Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.