The mindset the Avalanche front office has about Gabriel Landeskog returning to action has changed.
It used to be “when,” not “if.”
Now, it sounds like they’ve prepared for a world where the captain never plays again.
“Gabe continues to rehab,” general manager Chris MacFarland said on Monday. “He’s grinding hard every single day, but I don’t foresee him joining practice like in the next day or two, or week or two here.
“So I think you guys can figure out where this is, where this is going. But hopefully it’ll keep going well.”
Landeskog hasn’t played since the night the Avs won the Stanley Cup in Tampa Bay almost three years ago. There wasn’t even an inkling back then that the heartbeat of that roster would suffer through something like this.
The Avalanche started the season with enough cap space to reactivate him. But that’s since changed. They’re well into LTIR now and have just $3.2 million remaining in cap space before fully utilizing Landeskog’s salary.
Does that mean he’ll return in the playoffs when the salary cap is no longer implemented? Sure, but it’s not likely. At least that’s how it sounded when MacFarland was asked about it.
“There’s a chance — Hope,” he said. “Obviously I can’t predict the future, but he continues to rehab. He’s not practicing with the team yet. I mean, it’s two and a half years and you’re not practicing with the team in early March.
“We’re going to continue to take it week by week here. But he is grinding. He is doing everything he can. It’s just, I didn’t think June 26, 2022 that the injury would be three years, right? So I don’t know. There’s no playbook for this. We’ll just continue to chip away at it. And he’s doing everything he can that I know. So we’ll see where it goes.”