The 1,032 Day Comeback: How Gabe Landeskog Used Plantiga to Rebuild His NHL Career
The Injury No One Comes Back From
In the 2020 playoff bubble in Edmonton, a skate blade sliced through Gabe Landeskog's right quad. Two years later, he lifted the Stanley Cup as the youngest captain in NHL history to do so.
But the damage had never fully healed, and by 2023, the cumulative toll of the injury and the grind of the NHL schedule caught up with him. He underwent cartilage replacement surgery on May 10, 2023. It was a procedure no NHL player had ever successfully returned from. Two attempts to get back on the ice both ended the same way: a big flare-up, and back to square one.
"He was really struggling," said Dr. Matt Jordan, Plantiga's VP of Performance Science. "He had a long, long way to go to rebuild to get back to playing an NHL game."
Skate laceration
Stanley Cup win
Cartilage replacement surgery
Two failed comebacks
Starts working with Plantiga
The Problem With Traditional Rehab
By the time Gabe walked into the Integrative Neuromuscular Sport Performance Lab in Calgary in spring 2024, the standard rehab toolkit had already failed him twice. Pain and swelling only show up after the damage is done, so what he needed was a way to see a setback coming before his body told him.
Why symptom-based tracking has a blind spot
Pain and swelling are lagging indicators — by the time you feel them, the damage that caused them already happened. An athlete can be compensating, favouring one leg, or quietly overloading a joint for days before it hurts enough to notice. Movement data closes that gap: it shows changes in how the body is actually working in real time, so a small shift can be caught and corrected before it turns into pain, swelling, or another setback.
Introducing Plantiga
Gabe was connected to the Plantiga team through his performance therapist, Marcin Goszczynski. Marcin and Matt then started to put together a plan for how to more proactively approach his rehab.
"We discussed his injury and his frustration with the process," Matt said. "The tunnel was dark and long — there was no light... we were miles from the end of the tunnel."
Plantiga insoles went into both his skates and his everyday shoes. Unlike a clinic assessment or a single practice session, this meant continuous monitoring of how his body was actually moving — in the gym, on the ice, walking the dog, getting in the car.
How It Worked
Every day, Gabe put the sensors from his insoles into a docking station, uploading his movement data to the cloud. From there, Marcin and Matt could see it on a dashboard: stride mechanics, workload, and most importantly asymmetry between his surgically repaired knee and his healthy one.
"We could literally pick up the subtle changes in how Gabe's walk patterns were ebbing and flowing," Matt said.
As soon as asymmetries went outside of Gabe’s typical range, they would be flagged on his dashboard for Marcin and Matt to see. They would then adjust his training plan to bring his numbers back in range.
Matt describes it as “catching the smoke before the fire."
"Imagine you're at the point where you’re just at the cusp of, 'my knee's killing me, I can hardly walk.' We can see this in the data before you reach that tipping point."
Inside the Data
Building confidence, one walk test at a time
Early on, Gabe’s confidence hadn't caught up to his surgery. Daily walk tests gave him and the team an objective read on how his body was actually responding to rehab, not just how it felt. His average walking speed bottomed out at 1.06 m/s during an overload/response dip, then climbed steadily over the following months to 1.78 m/s.
Proving the interventions were working
The team's central question through rehab: is what we're doing actually working? Push-off asymmetry between his left and right leg turned out to be the most sensitive marker of function. The data shows the full arc: an overload spike to 28.7% asymmetry, a long stretch of gradual load tolerance, and then a PRP (platelet-rich plasma) injection, a treatment that typically produces a strong positive response in most athletes. For Gabe, the data told a different story: asymmetry actually spiked up afterward instead of improving. It was a clear, objective signal that this particular intervention wasn't delivering the expected benefit for his knee. If they had been going on subjective information alone, it would have been much more difficult to get this information. The team adjusted course and asymmetry eventually dropped to 3.20%, which was inside the normal range, and became the "unlock" point for progressing his rehab.
Catching fatigue before it became a setback
Load and asymmetry didn't move in lockstep. Asymmetry lagged behind load increases. When his total athlete load spiked to 41.6k g over a training block, push-off asymmetry followed a day later, climbing from 11.5% to 20.4%. That delay is exactly the kind of signal that's invisible to the eye or to how an athlete feels in the moment, but shows up clearly in the data. This signal gave the team a window to manage the next block's load before it became a flare-up.
The Comeback
By March, on-ice sessions were being layered back in. The benchmark became 200k g, because a teammate in the same position was hitting game loads of around that number, so the team gradually built Gabe’s load toward that goal rather than guessing. When his movement patterns looked clean and his load tolerance matched game-level demand, his team made the call that he was ready.
On April 23, 2025, Gabe made his return to the NHL in Game 3 of the Avalanche's first-round playoff series against the Dallas Stars. His last game before that was June 26, 2022, a gap of 1,032 days.
He was the first player in league history to return from this specific surgery.
But he didn't just come back to the ice; he contributed immediately, including goals in the Western Conference Final run and creating a noticeable uplift in the entire team’s energy.
"This detects any red flags before I even feel them," Gabe said. "It's been super important for me, and a huge help."
Still in Use Today
Plantiga didn't stop being useful once Gabe got back on the ice. He continues to wear the sensors to manage in-season workload. The same early-warning system that got him back is now what keeps him out there.
Why This Matters
Gabe's story is a proof point for what Plantiga is built to do: catch problems in real-world movement, not just in a clinic, and give athletes and medical staff a way to act before an injury becomes a setback. The same technology is now used across the NBA, NFL, WNBA, MLB, and NHL, plus college programs and elite individual athletes.