Gabriel Landeskog paused to gather his thoughts, thinking back three years to a time when he was experiencing what Dylan Larkin is going through right now.



In 2016-17, the Avalanche were having the worst season of the salary-cap era and Landeskog, at the time a 24-year-old captain, was leading them through it. If it wasn’t one thing for those Avalanche, it was another, and it culminated in a 48-point season that the 2019-20 Red Wings are seriously threatening to undercut. So what is it that Landeskog remembers about being the young leader of a team that bad? What sticks with him three years later, now at the helm of one of the league’s hottest teams?



“You gotta answer a lot of questions,” Landeskog said Monday morning. “Throughout the whole year, there’s a lot of questions to answer in terms of why certain things are the way they are, and for the most part you don’t have the answers that people are looking...