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.
