He's Back. Thank God.

Tortorella wants the Rangers to grind, but the head coach simply doesn't have enough grinders in his lineup. Last night, though, featured the return of Sean Avery to the grinding persona that had been missing for much of the early season. Avery consistently went to the net, battled in the corners, took hits to protect the puck, threw hits on the forecheck and engaged the Caps at essentially every whistle of the Blueshirts' 4-2 defeat. He played on the edge and he played with an attitude. Avery, who took one penalty himself, drew a roughing penalty on John Erskine early in third after referees Dan Marouelli and Dean Morton had given the Washington defenseman a handful of get out of jail free cards for obvious prior fouls he committed against No. 16. "The last two games, Sean has been better," said Tortorella, who is habitually sparing in his praise of Avery, but did give the winger 16:03 of ice, including 3:03 of PP time. "He was instrumental on our power-play goal."

Remember, Boudreau coached Avery when both were in the AHL with Manchester so he comes by his feelings the hard way. Avery must have grabbed a copy of Boudreau's book, though, because he spent much of warmups prior to Tuesday's game at Madison Square Garden lobbing verbal bombs at Boudreau again. "I didn't even know he was doing it until I looked over and I said to [assistant coach] Bob Woods 'Is he talking to me?' [Avery] just stayed at the redline and talked and talked. Didn't even take warmups. I never responded or even looked at him. But he took himself out of the game."

Yes, those are two seperate articles illustrating the madness that is Sean Avery. I watched the game last night and I would have to concurr with what Torts(that's the coach, not like tort crime but good retention from the previous post) said. The best part is he didn't even take warmups and still had one of the best games of this young season. We're a different breed, I suppose. Just when you're ready to count us out, we come back throwing 7 different kinds of smoke.