By 2008, Sean Avery had already built a reputation as the most disliked player in the NHL to play against — a relentless agitator who specialized in getting under opponents' skin by any means available. Most of it stayed within the game's usual boundaries of trash talk and gamesmanship. On December 2, 2008, in Calgary, he crossed a line the league had never actually needed to define before.
Avery's ex-girlfriend, actress Elisha Cuthbert, was by then dating Calgary Flames defenseman Dion Phaneuf. Before that night's Stars-Flames game, Avery deliberately gathered reporters and cameras for what was clearly a prepared statement. He opened casually, then delivered a crude remark about players around the league taking an interest in his former girlfriends — using a phrase crude enough that it needed no embellishment to make headlines on its own.
The NHL didn't wait. Commissioner Gary Bettman suspended Avery indefinitely that same day, citing conduct detrimental to the league — a remarkably fast turnaround for league discipline, and unusual in that the comment had nothing to do with anything that happened during a game. The suspension was later set at six games, along with a mandated anger management program.
The bigger blow came from his own locker room. Dallas players, reportedly including veterans Mike Modano and Marty Turco, made it known they weren't willing to have Avery back on the team. Within weeks, the Stars parted ways with him entirely, honoring the remainder of his contract rather than keep him around. It was, by a wide margin, the most damaging moment of his career.
The line itself outlived the incident. Years later, fans of his former team, the New York Rangers, still occasionally chanted the phrase at Phaneuf during games, a strange kind of tribute to how deeply the comment had lodged itself in hockey culture. Combined with a separate incident that same season — waving his stick in a goaltender's face during a playoff power play, which got the tactic banned outright and is still informally known as the Avery Rule — it cemented Sean Avery's reputation as the player who pushed hockey's unwritten boundaries further than anyone else, on the ice and very much off it.