Avery Clears Waivers

Rangers agitator Sean Avery cleared N.H.L. waivers on Wednesday, 24 hours after the Rangers placed him there and he was assigned to their American League affiliate in Hartford, the Connecticut Whale.

It came as little surprise that Avery went unclaimed by another team, which would have to pay him $2 million this season, high for a player who scored three goals last season.

When Avery was waived, his agent Pat Morris said he could explore avenues for Avery to play in Europe. The Rangers would have to agree to that, but likely would.

The Rangers also placed defenseman Marc Staal on injured reserve as he recovers from the effects of a concussion and recalled defenseman Tim Erixon from the Whale.

Rangers Waive an Agitator Who Stirred Up Opponents and Headlines

The latest chapter for one of New York’s most colorful and controversial professional athletes may have come to an end Tuesday when the Rangers placed
Sean Avery on waivers.

If no other N.H.L. team claims him by noon Wednesday, Avery will probably be assigned to the Rangers’ A.H.L. farm team in Hartford or be lent to a European club.

In his two stints with the Rangers, Avery was by far their most visible player, a fixture not only on the ice but also in the fashion world and in celebrity gossip columns. He was also a fan favorite at Madison Square Garden, though much of the rest of the hockey world did not hold him in such high esteem.

The Rangers’ decision to waive Avery, 31, was announced by Pat Morris, his agent, and confirmed by the team. Morris said in an e-mail that Avery would “look at all options,” including playing in Europe.

Avery arrived in Sweden on Tuesday with the Rangers ahead of their season opener on Friday in Stockholm. A spokesman said he would stay with the team until the Wednesday waiver deadline.

In the end, Avery fell victim to a numbers game and to his fraught relationship with Coach John Tortorella, who chose the shootout specialist Erik Christensen over Avery as the team’s 13th forward.

For all of his popularity in New York, Avery was widely reviled in hockey circles. In a 2007 poll of 283 N.H.L. players, 66 percent said Avery was the most hated man in the league. He came by that judgment honestly, sucker punching opponents on the ice and insulting them off it. But he also earned admiration in many quarters for his public support of same-sex marriage legislation in New York State.

Avery’s final significant, characteristically controversial moment came Sept. 26 in a preseason game in Philadelphia, where he accused the Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds of directing a homophobic slur at him. Simmonds and some of his teammates countered that Avery had provoked the incident and then made it public, considered bad form among players.

There seemed to be video evidence to support Avery’s claim against Simmonds. And an audio feed captured Avery saying he might have to “kill” Philadelphia’s Claude Giroux in response to what he saw as cheap shots by the Flyers. Neither player was disciplined by the league.

Until the incident, Avery had kept relatively aloof from reporters this preseason after an eventful summer in which he seemed to threaten a reporter who asked him about his breakup with his girlfriend and was charged with shoving a Los Angeles police officer — incidents believed to have alienated Garden management, even though the battery charge was later dropped.

Avery’s career was filled with incident — and with unsavory public remarks — as he played the role of an agitator who tried to draw penalties, often by excessive means.

He played a marginal role with Detroit and Los Angeles after breaking into the league during the 2001-2 season, but after a French-Canadian player injured a Kings teammate with a body check, Avery said it was “typical of most French guys in our league with a visor on, running around and playing tough and not back anything up.” The Kings later suspended Avery after he argued with an assistant.

Avery was traded to the Rangers in February 2007 and played well as an energetic third-liner for two seasons. But controversy was never far behind. When the Rangers beat the Devils in the 2008 playoffs, he stood in front of Devils goalie Martin Brodeur, waving his stick to distract him. It was a bit of gamesmanship not explicitly against the rules, but it forced the N.H.L. to issue an ad hoc clarification forbidding it.

Afterward, when Brodeur ignored Avery on the handshake line, Avery said, “Fatso forgot to shake my hand.”

In July 2008, Avery, a free agent, signed a four-year contract with Dallas. That December, he walked up to reporters before a game against Calgary and said, “I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the N.H.L. for guys to fall in love” with his former girlfriends, though Avery substituted a vulgar term. He was referring to the Flames’ tough-guy defenseman Dion Phaneuf, who was dating Avery’s former girlfriend Elisha Cuthbert, a Canadian actress.

Avery was suspended by the N.H.L. and ordered to undergo anger-management treatment.

Tortorella, working then as a commentator on the Canadian network TSN, said that Avery “embarrassed” himself, and “doesn’t belong in the league.”

Still, after the Stars put Avery on waivers, the Rangers picked him up — partly because Dallas would be on the hook for half his salary — to reprise his role as a third-line pest. Tortorella had been named the team’s new coach a little more than a week earlier.

Tortorella played Avery but often noted that he took too many penalties — even though statistics showed that he drew significantly more penalties than he took. The often short-tempered Tortorella occasionally snapped at reporters when they asked him about Avery in postgame news conferences.

Last season, Avery hit a new low for on-ice behavior, seeming to decline a challenge to fight by Edmonton’s Ladislav Smid, then suddenly delivering a right to Smid’s jaw, giving him a concussion.

“It looked to me like he suckered him — I’m not going to deny it,” Avery’s teammate Christensen said afterward.

If Avery clears waivers, it will open $1.9 million of salary-cap space for the Rangers. He has played 249 games as a Ranger, scoring 42 goals and 120 points, with 35 fights and 580 penalty minutes. Revealing though they are, however, the numbers represent little more than a chapter in Avery’s complex New York tenures.

Avery Waived by Rangers

The Rangers career of Sean Avery has been colorful (and more than occasionally, off-color), controversial and confounding to both his coaches and many of his opponents, whom he has managed to goad into losing their composure. It has never, however, matched the promise of his first weeks with the Rangers, when he arrived at the trade deadline in 2007 and helped catapult an underachieving team to a scintillating playoff run.

So when Avery’s agent, Pat Morris, confirmed the Rangers were placing him on waivers Tuesday afternoon, it came as no great surprise. He had never worked his way into the heart of Rangers Coach John Tortorella, who seemed at best to tolerate Avery and all that came with him. And by the time the Rangers made him a healthy scratch for two preseason games in Europe, it seemed the end had finally arrived.

The Rangers have not yet announced the move.

Should Avery, 31, not be claimed by another team on waivers, the Rangers will send him to their American League team in Hartford to minimize his salary cap impact. They are already only on the hook for half his $4 million salary, having claimed him on re-entry waivers from the Dallas Stars after his disastrous tenure there in 2008-09. No matter where Avery goes, the Stars have to pay him $2 million this season.

Avery’s high-water mark as an N.H.L. player came in his first days as Ranger, when he scored eight goals and had 12 assists in 29 games after the trade deadline, when the Rangers made up a huge gap in the standing to make the playoffs. In 2007-08, he was somewhat less effective, but still enough of a pest to make himself valuable and had one of his most memorable moments in the playoffs with a power play goal against the Devils. To distract Devils goalie Martin Brodeur, Avery waved his stick and arms in front of Brodeur and when a shot got through, Avery put in the rebound for a goal. The N.H.L. then announced such a move would be penalized as goalie interference in the future.

Avery never had as big an impact after returning to the Rangers in 2009. Playing a diminishing role in Tortorella’s rotation, Avery had just 24 points in 76 games last season.

This summer, Avery taped a video supporting the push for same-sex marriage in New York. This became on-ice news when Avery claimed Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds called him an anti-gay slur during a preseason game. Simmonds was not punished by the N.H.L. despite the slur being captured on video.

Later, Tortorella indicated Avery was fighting for the 13th forward spot on the team with Erik Christensen.

Teams have 24 hours to claim players placed on waivers.

What Avery and Simmonds Said, in Their Own Words

PHILADELPHIA — The Rangers had already started boarding the buses that would take them to the Philadelphia airport and from there to Prague on Monday night as Wayne Simmonds was answering reporters’ questions about the homophobic slur he may have used against Sean Avery.

It all started in the first period, when Philadelphia’s Tom Sestito rammed the Rangers’ Andre Deveaux into the boards from behind, a play that will almost certainly result in a multigame suspension from the N.H.L.’s new, tough disciplinary boss, Brendan Shanahan.

In the aftermath of the hit, Simmonds and Avery wrestled and exchanged angry words, an exchange that continued after they separated. Simmonds was caught on video seeming to mouth the slur.

Simmonds is the black player who was the object of an apparent racial slur last week in London, Ontario, when a fan threw a banana peel on the ice as Simmonds was taking a penalty shot. Avery, who is white, was suspended and ordered to undergo anger management training in 2008 for his own vulgar remarks regarding former girlfriends, but he also publicly urged the New York State Legislature last summer to legalize same-sex marriage.

It is the recent histories of the two principals that makes this particular controversy all the more trenchant.

Below, Avery’s postgame remarks to reporters, followed by those of Simmonds:

Q: What exactly happened out there?

AVERY: Well, what are you guys asking me?

Q: Did he call you what we think he called you?

AVERY: Yes. Yeah.

Q: Is he going to say that there was anything you said that made say what he said?

AVERY: I certainly hope not. Are you implying that it would be from something I said?

Q: No, I’m just asking–

AVERY: From my end, there was certainly nothing.

Q: Are you aware of what happened with him last week?

AVERY: Yeah. It’s really disappointing. When I saw that I thought, first of all, who would do that, and why would you do it? It’s such an unnecessary thing. It’s something that’s not even an issue with us, or our sport. So to be here now and to have to answer questions about what he did is disappointing for me. I’m disappointed for him.

Q: Do you feel like, when something says something like that, that should be treated in a similar context?

AVERY: I mean, Kobe Bryant got fined a hundred grand. Everything’s different now. It’s an issue. It’s an issue that people are dealing with and trying to overcome. I guess 10 years ago maybe it wasn’t so much an issue. But it’s certainly an issue politically, with people in the game, and just in life in general.

Q: Is there concern or a feeling that because you’ve been vocal on the issue this summer with the video you did that players will come back and use that against you?

AVERY: You know what, I haven’t even — I mean, it’s been said for years, whether I thought about it in that sense … I don’t know.

Q: Did you think he just said it out of emotion?

AVERY: Again, I have no idea.

Q: Would you like to see the league make a stand on this?

AVERY: That’s something that I’m not going to really comment on. I think that first of all, me commenting on things like that, the backlash that I could receive is unknown. I don’t want to put the team in a situation where they would have to deal with something because of me wanting to see something happen, or anything along those lines. So I’m not going to go there.

In an odd coincidence, Avery was speaking the same night that Columbus’s James Wisniewski was suspended for the rest of the exhibition season and eight regular-season games and fined almost $537,000 for an illegal hit. Last season, Wisniewski was suspended two games for directing a vulgar homophobic gesture at Avery.

After Avery spoke, Simmonds appeared in the Philadelphia dressing room and spoke to reporters.

Q: Could you tell us the nature of the exchange you had with Sean Avery?

SIMMONDS: You know, it was just a scrum. I felt that he sucker-punched me. We were going back and forth for the rest of the game, and emotions run high. We both exchanged words with each other.

Q: On the video it looked like you might have said a particular thing to him, a slur or something. Was that the case?

SIMMONDS: Honestly, we were going back and forth for a while there, and I don’t recall every single thing that I did say to him. He said some things that I didn’t like, and I said some things that he didn’t like. But I can’t recall every single word I said.

Q: What did he say to you?

SIMMONDS: Things get said out there. It’s not necessary that I repeat it to the media. So I’m not going to say what he said.

Q: When we talked to Avery in the room he said very definitely that you called him what we’ll call a homophobic slur. And he said he didn’t think that he said anything that would have prompted that.

SIMMONDS: He didn’t think he said anything? I mean, he’s Sean Avery, come on now. Who knows what comes out of his mouth.

Q: He didn’t say anything to you that would have prompted that, or did he not?

SIMMONDS: Well, we were going back and forth, battling the whole time. So he definitely said some things to me I wasn’t too happy about. But that’s where it is.

Q: Did he say anything that crossed the line?

SIMMONDS: I don’t know. I can’t recall every single word that was said. So I can’t really– I’m not here to say that he said this, and I’m not going to rat him out. It’s in the heat of a hockey game, that’s what it is.

Q: Did you feel that you said anything to him that crossed the line?

SIMMONDS: I don’t think so. It just got heated, like I said before. If you have to write a couple stories on it, that’s just what happens sometimes.

Q: Just considering what happened with you earlier, last week, is it surprising to find yourself on the other, kind of, end of this?

SIMMONDS: You know what? It’s something that happens every game. Guys say stuff, and you know what? It’s just the heat of the battle, of the game. It’s not necessarily things are said to hurt people. Sometimes it happens.

How the N.H.L. handles this incident — and even how it determines whether there is evidence of an actionable offense in the first place — will be fascinating to watch in the coming days.

Metro Pucks Report: Staal, Streit, Avery, Josefson, Parise, Nabokov

The uncertain status of their best defenseman looms over the Rangers as they prepare to leave Monday night on a European road trip that includes four exhibition contests and the first two games of the regular season.

Marc Staal, the 24-year-old anchor of the club’s blue line, participated in an hour-long, non-contact practice on Sunday, but he will not travel with the team to Prague, where the Rangers play the first of four European preseason games on Thursday. Staal is still experiencing symptoms from a concussion sustained in a game in Carolina in February, when he absorbed a punishing hit from his brother Eric, a star forward with the Hurricanes.

Rangers Coach John Tortorella told reporters on Sunday that Staal was continuing a series of tests and treatments, including acupuncture. The club’s medical personnel should be able to provide an update on his condition by the end of the week. Tortorella would not rule out the possibility that  Staal would meet the team in Europe and be in the opening day lineup. The Rangers play the Los Angeles Kings on Oct. 7, and the Anaheim Ducks the following day. Both games are in Stockholm.

“We’re going to try and get him on the trip,” Tortorella said. “Once he feels better and we know he can get into all the stuff we need for him to be ready for the regular season, he’ll come out.”

While the Rangers wait for answers, the high hopes of the franchise and its fans for Stanley Cup contention are tempered, at least temporarily. New York added the first-line center Brad Richards as a free agent in July, addressing the roster’s primary need. The Rangers have a balanced attack at forward and an All-Star,  Henrik Lundqvist, in goal. But without Staal, the team’s leader in ice time and a defender who plays in every crucial situation, the coaching staff will struggle to find effective matchups against Evgeni Malkin, Alexander Ovechkin and the other high-powered forwards of the Eastern Conference.

As coaches do, Tortorella tried to spin Staal’s absence as a chance for other defenders to showcase their ability. But Tortorella, who does not go about his profession with a lack of zeal, was a bit halfhearted in his pronouncement.

“Everybody bumps up,” he said. “Everybody gets more of an opportunity. I guess that’s the best way to put it.”

Tortorella may have no other choice. The roster includes a veteran shutdown defenseman in Dan Girardi and the emerging young talents Ryan McDonagh and Michael Sauer. All are capable of logging extensive minutes in a pinch. But over the six-month grind that is the N.H.L. regular season, no one on the Rangers’ roster can replace Staal if his absence is prolonged. In the salary cap era, there is also no way to replace a player of his caliber with a trade or free-agent signing.

“If we don’t have him,” the Rangers’ captain, Ryan Callahan, said of Staal, “there’s a huge hole.”

Expect the Rangers to continue to be cautious with Staal. He can always meet them further down the road.

TRENDING

Up: Mark Streit – On Saturday the Islanders defenseman reminded the league what his team missed last season when he was sidelined for all 82 games with a serious shoulder injury. In his first game in 17 months, a preseason contest against the Devils at Nassau Coliseum, Streit played 24 minutes and had a goal and two assists in a 6-2 Islanders victory.

Down: Sean Avery – The Rangers’ shift-disturbing wing has neither played nor misbehaved his way out of the lineup. Avery appears to trail Mats Zuccarello for the final forward position available and is joined in the battle for a job by the youngsters Dale Weise and Carl Hagelin and the veteran shootout specialist Erik Christensen. The Rangers possess more depth than they’ve had in years. Unless Avery shines in the team’s final five preseason games, starting Monday in Philadelphia, he could be placed on waivers and start the season with the minor league affiliate in Connecticut.

SHOW OF HANDS
The Devils are counting on 20-year-old center Jacob Josefson to be a playmaker on a line with Zach Parise or Ilya Kovalchuk this season. As Josefson, New Jersey’s 2009 first-round pick, demonstrated in this goal on Friday against the Rangers, assisted by Kovalchuk, the Swede can finish, too. His rapid release gave Rangers goaltender Martin Biron no time to react.

NOTES

In the league’s worst-kept secret since the Atlanta Thrashers’ springtime relocation to Winnipeg, the details for the 2012 N.H.L. Winter Classic will be announced on Monday in Philadelphia. The combatants, whose prize is four weeks of strong, uncensored exposure on the HBO documentary series “24/7,” are the Rangers and host Flyers. The outdoor game will be held on Jan. 2 at Citizens Bank Park, home of the Philadelphia Phillies.

Over the last two weeks, the Islanders named Streit as captain and the Rangers selected Callahan. Next up are the Devils. Their choice is expected to be Parise, the gifted goal scorer and United States Olympian who could become a free agent at the end of this season.

After starting Rick DiPietro in Boston on Friday and Al Montoya at home on Saturday, Coach Jack Capuano figures to give Evgeni Nabokov his shot this week in the Islanders’ goalie competition. The team plays its final exhibition games on Tuesday in Calgary; Friday in New Jersey; and Saturday in Bridgeport, Conn. against the Bruins. Also, look for the team to sign 37-year-old defenseman Steve Staios, who has impressed management during his training camp tryout with gritty play and inspiring leadership.

Chris Botta will report all season on the Rangers, the Islanders and the Devils.