Gabriel Landeskog’s right knee remains a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes, but you’ll have to wait until next season to find out if he cracks the case.
The Avalanche captain has officially called it quits for his 2022-23 season that never was, ruling himself out for the Stanley Cup Playoffs while he tries to figure out how to cure the cartilage injury under his patella. Landeskog is still consulting medical experts about next steps to take this offseason, and a fourth surgery since 2020 is an option.
Sure sounds like a plight that will bedevil Landeskog and the Avalanche at least into next season, if not longer. Considering the salary cap implications of his $7 million absence, the Avs probably want a quicker resolution about the captain’s 2023-24 fate.
“Leading into the draft and free agency, ” general manager Chris MacFarland said, “that will certainly have to be part of our equation, is his situation.”
But as for the more immediate obstacle, the mystery has shifted from Landeskog’s availability to how far Colorado can go without him.
“Definitely it’s a little quieter in our room without Landy,” Nathan MacKinnon told The Post. “… He’s our captain for a reason.”
MacFarland said the team will not name another temporary captain while Landeskog remains out. But intangibles aside, the impact on playoff ice can’t be overstated. There’s a reason he gritted his teeth last April and returned from knee surgery just in time for the Avs’ first playoff game. There’s a reason he averaged 21 minutes en route to the Stanley Cup, even though he eventually stopped participating in pregame skates.
“Players like him don’t grow on trees,” MacFarland said.
Landeskog is a force — a dynamic skater who fits into Colorado’s fast-paced system while also supplying an intuitive net-front presence and proclivity for the greasy goals that reach higher face value in the playoffs.
In 51 games last season, he had a 56.75% expected-goals-for rate. Then the playoffs arrived, and he upped the intensity. Landeskog’s xGF% was 63.87%, ranking fourth among all NHL players who appeared in at least 10 postseason games. He played in 20.
Landeskog did that a month after surgery.
The best-case top-six without Landeskog is a healthy lineup of Artturi Lehkonen, MacKinnon, Rantanen, Valeri Nichushkin, J.T. Compher and Evan Rodrigues. Four of those are carry-overs from last year. Compher is Kadri’s replacement, and Rodrigues is Landeskog’s placeholder.
Landeskog and Kadri combined for 58 goals and 146 points in the 2021-22 regular season (2.38 PPG). In the playoffs, they stayed close to that pace with 2.04 PPG combined across 36 games. This season, Compher and Rodrigues have 32 goals and 88 points (1.20 PPG between them).
That doesn’t illustrate the full extent of their strengths — Compher is a Selke-caliber defensive forward, and Rodrigues a versatile linemate who complemented Sidney Crosby last season — but it does get at a larger point.
Colorado’s four returning top-six forwards have picked up some of the statistical slack. MacKinnon, Rantanen, Nichushkin and Lehkonen combined for a 3.98 PPG sum last year, which — split among four players, instead of two — didn’t keep up with Landeskog and Kadri. This season, those four players combined for 4.53.
That results in a top-six this year producing a sum of 5.73 PPG. For comparison, a wild card team like Seattle is at 3.95. But at a higher tier, Edmonton’s top-six produced 6.90.
Even if Colorado was close to last season’s 6.36, ideally that scoring wealth would be spread more evenly among all six, instead of four (two in particular) carrying the bulk.
Those numbers don’t reveal a gaping deficiency so much as they highlight the ripple effect of Landeskog’s absence: These Avs are more vulnerable if they suffer an injury to a top player. In the 2022 playoffs, they were unscathed when they lost Kadri.
That the Avalanche managed to heat up recently without one of those four (Lehkonen) is a testament to their championship resolve. But will that hold up against deeper opponents in the playoffs?
Resolve might look like a flimsy quality against Connor McDavid.
