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Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog expected to miss entire 2023-24 season

The Colorado Avalanche will have to play another season without their captain.

Colorado Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog will undergo a cartilage transplant in his right knee on Wednesday and is expected to miss the entire 2023-24 season, the team announced.

Landeskog didn't appear in any games for the Avalanche in 2022-23 as he recovered from knee surgery in October. He was only expected to miss 12 weeks following that procedure.

The Swede also had knee surgery in March of 2022, missing 23 games before returning to help Colorado win the Stanley Cup that season. He also had an operation on his quad during the 2020 playoffs after he was accidentally cut by teammate Cale Makar's skate.

"The timeline goes back to the bubble 2020," Landeskog told NHL.com in April. "Kind of a freak accident that happens there. Never had any knee issues before that. One thing led to the next and it just sort of progressively got worse over that next year.

"Start of [last] season it started bugging me on a daily basis. It got worse and worse up until the point that we got the first surgery. At that point I didn't really realize the complexity of the injury and how one injury can, obviously it compensates."

The Avalanche will have to play another season without captain Gabriel Landeskog. (Photo by Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Despite the injury roller coaster he's been on over the past several years, the 30-year-old said last month that he still thinks he'll be able to return to NHL action down the road.

"I'm confident in that," he said, via NHL.com. "When? I don't know. You try and take it one step at a time. This is no different than going into a new season, essentially. Where you start with training camp and you go from there. This is the same thing. I'm trying not to look too far ahead. But I'm confident, and like I said, we'll get through this."

Colorado started the 2022-23 season slowly without Landeskog and sat at 20-17-3 on Jan. 12 before a six-game win streak turned its season around. The team also entered the playoffs on a tear, winning 16 of its final 19 contests to earn the Central Division crown.

The Avalanche were surprisingly upset by the wild-card Seattle Kraken in the first round of the postseason.