Former Ranger Sean Avery has called for John Tortorella to be fired. (Jonathan Kozub, Getty Images)

When he’s not starring on E!’s Fashion Police or ripping off Charlie Sheen’s catchphrases, professional lightning rod Sean Avery sets aside some time to follow his old club, the New York Rangers.

And like most of the team’s fans, he’s not too happy with the way things are going of late. In fact, the team’s listless 3-0 loss to Montreal tonight inspired a rather pointed suggestion for Rangers’ GM Glen Sather regarding the future employment of coach John Tortorella.

Avery, always on the cutting edge, decided to shared it on Twitter:

Fire this CLOWN, his players hate him and wont play for his BS…. @imseanavery is #winning—
Sean Avery (@imseanavery) March 31, 2013

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Tyler Myers (57, far left) scores one of three power-play goals for the Sabres on Sunday. (Bill Wippert/Getty Images)

By Allan Muir

• A couple months from now, we all may be applauding Hockey Night In Canada’s producers for the patience they showed while allowing the new five-man panel to work through some early growing pains. But hey, we might be raving about Lance Armstrong’s appointment as the head of WADA too, right?

If the group–host Ron MacLean, and commentators Elliotte Friedman, Kevin Weekes, Glen Healy and P.J. Stock — were simply an embarrassment of riches, then it might just be a matter of letting them find their rhythm. But outside of consummate professional MacLean and Friedman, who has established himself as the game’s top studio presence, the rest of the crew came off like the unprepared guy at the meeting who feels like he has to say something, anything, to impress the boss. They were bland and noisy as they flailed to claim some space as their own. It all made for lousy TV.

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What a pain: the short schedule will magnify the time lost to injury by key players such as Kings center Anze Kopitar. (Ric Tapia/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

About the only thing one can say with certainty about the upcoming NHL season is that nothing is certain.

Each of the 30 NHL teams has specific concerns heading into the truncated 48-game schedule, but there are some questions every one of the will face. In our Friday post on training camps, we noted that NBC’s and SI’s Pierre McGuire has studied shortened seasons and it’s worth repeating the five things he believes teams need in order to be competitive: 1) very good goaltending; 2) a four-line attack; 3) a coach with an understanding of work-to-rest ratio so players don’t break down and risk injury; 4) avoiding prolonged losing streaks of five games or more; and 5) creative coaching.

That said, here are some of the major themes that could potentially color the competition in the mad dash to the Stanley Cup playoffs.

1. The Schedule — Only once before in the post-World War II era has the league played a 48-game slate — in 1995 due to that season’s lockout. Of all the wild cards in what could be a wild season, this is the biggest. Every aspect of the game will be impacted by the shorter, compressed schedule. Instead of 82 games in 183 days, or one game every 2.23 days, we’ll get 48 in 98 days, or one every 2.04 days. With play restricted to each team’s own conference, each contest means more since they are all essentially four-point games.

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One year after a tragic plane crash decimated the KHL team, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl returned to the ice. Colorado’s Semyon Varlamov (left, greeting former Capitals teammate Alex Ovechkin after a game) has been tending goal. (Photo by Yury Kuzmin/KHL Photo Agency via Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

A big dark storm cloud lingers over any celebration of hockey in 2012. It’s the NHL lockout and it has been showering grief on the game and its fans for over three months. Now, it also makes my job here a bit easier compared to my colleagues who are covering other sports because so little has happened between June and December that the range of choices for my favorite stories of the year has been sliced dramatically. Still, I’d rather be burdened by having to choose from a full plate.

That said, here are my 10 highlights. (You can read other SI.com writers’ picks here and view a gallery of the 112 most amazing sports moments of 2012 here.)

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If the Rangers can’t get their offense going, stellar goalie Henrik Lundqvist will have to steal another win. (Paul Bereswill/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

Will the Devils be able to build on their 4-1 Game 4 win when they visit Madison Square Garden tonight for Game 5 or will the Rangers frustrate, if not disrupt, New Jersey’s territorial dominance and find the offensive gear that was absent on Monday in Newark? Those are the main questions facing these two teams in what is now a best-of-three and the only series left before the Stanley Cup Final begins one week from today.

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Brandon Prust’s suspension for elbowing Anton Volchenkov’s head in Game 3 removes some physicality from the Rangers’ lineup as they try to take command of the series. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

It’s Game 4 in Newark tonight and a big one. A Rangers win over the Devils would give them a 3-1 lead in the series and a chance to close it out at home in Game 5. New Jersey, which always won the big games it had to against the Panthers and Flyers earlier this spring, looks to even the series at 2-2 and make it a minimum six-game affair. And to add some fuel to this combustible rivalry, the physical nature of the series has heated up and the coaches are getting into it.

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By Stu Hackel

As a group, hockey coaches don’t often command the spotlight when the cameras roll. They defer to their players and reserve whatever fiery rhetorical skills they possess for the sanctity of the dressing room.

Guys like Dale Hunter and Darryl Sutter will never make the list of the century’s great orators, anyway. But then there’s the Rangers’ John Tortorella, the subject of the video tribute above (the great work of DJ Steve Porter who, as Yahoo’s Puck Daddy Editor Greg Wyshynski relates, has a pretty impressive history of remixing video clips, hockey and otherwise) that appeared on Saturday over Hockey Night In Canada.

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Devils sniper Ilya Kovalchuk, who has been playing with a suspected bad back, must continue to be productive against New York’s tough defense and stellar goaltending. (Scott Levy/NHLI via Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

They’re not good neighbors, as we saw a few times this season, but that can make for great hockey when the Devils and Rangers hook up. Yes, there will be echoes of 1994, when New York won the Eastern Conference championship in the second overtime period of Game 7, but that was long ago. With the exception of Marty Brodeur, who is still in goal for the Devs, almost everything and everyone has changed, including the way each team plays: The Rangers are now the more defensive oriented club and the Devils are the team that might be stronger offensively. But both play a strong all-around game and this series will be a treat.

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Dustin Brown and Brian Boyle have emerged as the two big surprise stars of the postseason thus far. (Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

One major aspect of the playoffs careening out of control, the subject of our post yesterday, is that players misdirect their heightened emotions. There is much on the line, of course, and every hockey fan admires the fact that NHLers can invest so much more of themselves in the game and play with a committment that is unparalleled in all of sports. The problem comes when they cannot channel their emotions correctly, and that has been the defining characteristic of the first week of the tournament.

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Another season of dealing with age, injuries and getting the most out of his team likely won’t be enough to earn Detroit bench boss Mike Babcock his first Jack Adams Award. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

It’s been a rough season for coaches. Eight have been replaced, three — Lindy Ruff, Tom Renney and Todd McLellan – have been injured and forced to miss some games, and then there’s poor Randy Cunneyworth, the good soldier who accepted the toughest coaching job in the league, with the Canadiens,  which was made all the more difficult because they are no good and he’s unilingual.

With the NHL season heading down the home stretch, our thoughts also turn to the good work some coaches have done. These are the men who deserve consideration for the Jack Adams Award as NHL Coach of the Year.

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