The Goon Squad

Sean Avery chopping some dudes legs off in a random minor-league hockey game is a classic of the Sean Avery genre

When you think of the most uniformly disliked dudes in modern hockey—John Scott, Brad Marchand, Evander Kane—it’s hard not to mention Sean Avery. Avery bounced franchise to franchise throughout his 11-year NHL career, sticking longest in New York, where assholes are just part of the scenery. Avery survived because he served a very specific purpose—getting under an opponent’s pads—and also because he had a sort of unhinged charisma that was amusing from a distance.

In retirement, that “charisma” manifested in a series of viral videos where Avery could be found patrolling the bike lanes of Manhattan, harassing violators and passerby with equal zeal. That, as all attention-craving obnoxiousness usually does, eventually led to a podcast and then back to the barn, where Avery signed for the ECHL Orlando Solar Bears in February.

Avery was cut two days later (shocker, we know), but that didn’t stop his quest to become the biggest pest on ice once more. So instead of hanging up the skates for good, Avery doubled down, posting a clip of him chopping an opponent’s legs off in a random minor-league hockey game to his own Instagram this week.

It takes a very specific kind of person to post something like this to their own social media, and that kind of person is Sean Avery. We’d say it’s because Avery doesn’t give a sh*t, but it’s the exact opposite. The fact is he gives a lot of sh*ts. He needs his name to be in everyone’s mouth at all times and when it’s not, he picks up his stick and starts hacking away. It’s never failed him before, why would it fail him now?