But he still knows how to tie one on.

"How do you say 'cheers' in the Jewish language?" the flashy forward asked guests at the opening of his new Tribeca bar and restaurant Warren 77 on Friday, May 15.

"L'chaim!" the crowd replied.

"There ya go," said Mr. Avery, who further encouraged attendees to "just keep buying drinks because I didn't open a fucking bar for nothing."

Pro hockey's preeminent bad boy gave props to his partners, Chris Miller and Matt Abramcyk, for their four months of work in building out the space. Mr. Abramcyk told the Daily Transom the place was still covered with sawdust only hours before the grand opening.

Mr. Avery may turn out to be a more hands-on style of operator than most celebrity restaurateurs. Early in the evening, when his partners complained about the level of lighting, he promptly hopped up onto a wobbly stool and unscrewed sizzling bulbs with his bare fingers.

Mr. Avery and his partners had traveled to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto for inspiration in designing the venue.

Hung with framed photos of past Rangers greats and a brightly illuminated goalie mask greeting visitors at the entrance on Warren Street, the new watering hole might quickly be categorized as a sports bar. But that's a bit of a misnomer, according to Mr. Miller; it's "a bar steeped in athleticism and the history of New York," he told the Daily Transom.

Five flatscreen TVs lining the walls are intermittingly hidden behind retractable screens to avoid the sort of flickering "sports soup" you find at most venues of that ilk, he added.

It's the type of place you'd expect to see scruffy brutes quaffing pints of Molson Canadian while their waifish girlfriends gingerly sip flutes of sancerre.

"I don't get treated this nice at most places," said New York Post hockey writer Larry Brooks, whom Mr. Avery greeted with a clink of glasses and some good-humored teasing.

"You don't dress this nice at work," the former Vogue intern told the typically slovenly sportswriter, who showed up in a tucked-in button-up shirt and slacks.

Rangers goalie Henrik Lundquist, dressed in a white T-shirt and fedora, opened the party with a set of cover songs on his acoustic guitar and later huddled with former teammate Brendan Shanahan and Rangers fan John McEnroe at a reserved booth in the front. Another former teammate of Mr. Avery's, Brad Richards, made the trip from Dallas for the festivities.

Disc jockey and impresario Paul Sevigny, meanwhile, drank from a miniature Stanley Cup at the bar. "Tasted better in '94," he told the Daily Transom, referring to the Rangers' last championship. (Asked what can be done to reopen the still-shuttered Beatrice Inn, which he co-owns with Mr. Abramcyk, Mr. Sevigny said, "Pray a lot.")

Nearby, nightlife vet Amy Sacco mingled among the many athletes.

"I met Sean Avery and Brendan Shanahan at the Rose Bar two years ago," Ms. Sacco told the Daily Transom. "I looked to my right at these two handsome men I’ve never seen with a bunch a friends. I figured one, at least, is married and the other’s gay, or whatever," she joked. "And they said, ‘Would you like to come with us to this place called Bungalow 8?’ I was like, ‘Wow. Okay!’"(Ms. Sacco is Bungalow's owner.) "We've been friends ever since. I took them to the Met ball that year. They taught me about hockey."

Now a die-hard puckhead, Ms. Sacco didn't hesistate to offer her post-season analysis of what went wrong with the Rangers.

"They should never have not re-signed Shanahan," she said. "Biggest mistake of their lives."

The team is the New Jersey Devils. They play ice hockey very well, better than any other team in the world. Since ice hockey is one of the Western world's greatest sports, and they're currently the best at it, you might think that people would care about them. But to most New Yorkers, the Devils are like an indoor lacrosse team or a state senator from Maine: remote, irrelevant, unfashionable, symbolic of nothing.

"People in Manhattan, they don't give a crap," said Phil Esposito, the former Ranger and Boston Bruin who nowadays reads innocuous bits of hockey analysis on Fox Sports Net. He was standing near a ramp leading from the visitors' dressing room to the ice just before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Devils and the Dallas Stars in the Continental Airlines Arena. A pair of Zambonis drove by, while the arena organist whirled through a melancholic rendition of "Rubber Ducky." Mr. Esposito continued his dissertation. "They care about the Rangers, they care about the Knickerbockers, they care about Giants and the Jets, the Yankees and the Mets, but they just don't care about these guys," Mr. Esposito said. "And I don't know why."

Here are some theories, Espo: Hockey in the New York area is merely a cult, the Devils have no big stars, they play in the swamps of New Jersey and they have a reputation for playing a boring, defensive style. Above all, they stand for nothing bigger, except for the polyglot nature of hockey and suburbia, which is not the kind of thing that the Frank Defords of the world get worked up about.

But, they are a great hockey club. The Devils have compiled the second best record in the National Hockey League over the last decade; the only other New York-area team that comes close to that kind of consistent winning is the Yankees. They have become, with a limited budget, one of the best-run organizations in professional sports: frugal, familial, victorious. They play with flair and moxie. They hit hard and dart about the ice like barn swallows. And on June 5, they swarmed the defending champion Stars 3-1, to take a 3-1 lead in the series-one win away from a parking-lot victory parade.

And now they are about to belong to George Steinbrenner and his new YankeeNets corporation, which combines the greatest franchise in sports with one of the most hapless. The Devils will presumably fill the vast gulf between them. Earlier this year, John McMullen, the Devils' 83-year-old owner, announced that he was selling the team for $175 million, after failing to persuade New Jersey to give him the rights to build a new arena in Hoboken, a slap shot away from the Garden. The transfer of ownership will take place in July, according to YankeeNets chief executive Harvey Schiller, at which point the last small-town team in the New York area will pass into the hands of a cable-content conglomerate with little ice in its veins.

Twenty years ago, the New York Islanders won the first of four consecutive straight Stanley Cups. They became one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the sport, but nobody in the city really cared. The Islanders were, well, islanders. For their fans on Long Island, the team was a rebuke to the big city, a claim to an identity of their own in the megalopolis. Long Island was riding high: Nassau County's own Alfonse D'Amato had won a U.S. Senate seat; Grumman was cranking out fighter jets.

The Rangers' moment came a decade later. Their Stanley Cup victory in 1994 marked an end to the longest championship drought in hockey. It is hard to imagine now that such a thing can be ascribed to hockey, but the Rangers' 1994 Stanley Cup run, coinciding with the early days of the Giuliani administration, went a long way toward helping the city rebuild its self-esteem. The Yanks may one day be remembered as this era's boomtown team, but the Rangers touched it off. The cup was suddenly winnable, much as the city would soon prove governable. Mark Messier, Brian Leetch and Mike Richter, the team's Manhattan bachelors, toted the silver cup around town, to Yorkville bars and the set of David Letterman's Late Show , goading the city into caring about this cult sport.

Underpaid and Unknown

But what about the Devils? In another era, in another place, they might have become symbols of something, in the manner of the 1970-73 Knicks or the 1969 Mets. But the Devils, born in Kansas City, raised in Colorado and transferred to New Jersey in 1982, cheered on by big-eared Bergen County kids in face paint and droopy red jerseys, have failed to transcend their bland status as the perfect hockey club.

The Devils are an anomaly in professional sports, especially in the New York area, in that almost all the members of the team are underpaid relative to their peers in the league. They have a raft of cheap and nifty rookies, including the best of the year, Scott Gomez, who is the first Hispanic player in the National Hockey League. Their two most dynamic forwards, a pair of Czechs named Patrik Elias and Petr Sykora, each make less than a million dollars a year. Their team captain and most valuable playoff performer, the bone-crushing defenseman Scott Stevens, last year signed a contract to stay with the team, accepting much less than he would have gotten on the open market, because he was comfortable with its system.

The system. That's what has defined the Devils for the last decade. The system has meant many things-a disciplined playing style, an organizational philosophy, an intolerance for contractual shenanigans-all of which have sprung from the team's fiscally conservative general manager, Lou Lamoriello.

Mr. Lamoriello is a hard man and a shrewd negotiator. Players who stick it out in contract disputes often find themselves banished to small-market Canadian teams. In the dressing room, the Devils call the team the Firm. It is difficult to leave on your own terms. Mr. Lamoriello has his employees turn out their lights when they leave the offices for the night. He doesn't want to go looking for them. He frowns upon family photographs in the office.

"Lou's imprint is everywhere," said Stan Fischler, a Devils commentator who has written nearly 100 books about hockey. "Lou is more closely identified with this team than any other executive in sports. Nothing happens that Lou doesn't know about."

The fate of the team under the YankeeNets depends entirely on its ability to retain Lou Lamoriello. As always, he is driving a hard bargain. Money he has (he made $7 million in the sale); control is what he needs. Fortunately for him-and for the YankeeNets-Mr. Steinbrenner is not much of a hockey man, so the control problem is not intractable. "Our goal is to keep Lou on board," Mr. Schiller said. "There's no need to talk about a plan B."

Mr. Lamoriello has never looked better. Until recently, the Devils were considered boring: faceless, plodding, relentless, even a little mean. Manhattan's hockey browsers preferred the less-than-mediocre Rangers, who had fragile stars with inscrutable psyches and inconsistent talents.

For a while, the Devils' disciplined system seemed to be their undoing. Since winning the cup in 1995, the Devils have had numbingly productive regular seasons, only to underachieve miserably in the playoffs. Each year, they seemed to suffer brain-lock. The system, imposed from above, stifled them.

But this spring, something blossomed. In March, late in the season, Mr. Lamoriello fired Robbie Ftorek, the Devils' humorless, at times paranoid head coach, with eight games left in the regular season, and with the team in first place! He replaced Mr. Ftorek with Larry Robinson, his easygoing assistant. The Devils started to have fun again. The team loosened up psychologically, and began to play with grit and joy.

Just Like the Yanks

In a way the Devils are like their new corporate cousins, the Yankees: no superstars, just a collection of level-headed professionals, a mix of hardened veterans and precocious kids. Mr. Robinson is their Joe Torre, a cool, wise, empathetic presence who provides an emotional ballast. Like Joe Torre, Mr. Robinson had a mediocre head coaching career prior to getting a starring role in the New York area. This spring, however, he has been perfect.

The team has a corps of great defensemen, most notably Mr. Stevens, the flashy speedster Scott Niedermayer and Ken Daneyko, the stay-at-homer who has been on the team since 1983. They are complemented by a paradigmatic entourage of Russians: Alexander Mogilny, a dashing stylist; Vladimir Malakhov, a hard-shooting head case; Sergei Nemchinov, a taciturn workaholic; and Sergei Brylin, a tough little imp with soft hands.

"There's no schmuck on this team," Mr. Fischler said. "When Lou drafts, his scouts know that they're looking for character guys."

Well, maybe one schmuck, if you're a fan of an opposing team. They have the league's least popular player, Claude Lemieux, a gruff teammate and a cheap-shot artist-hockey's Pete Rose, "the gum on your shoe," as Mr. Daneyko recently put it-who is about as proven a playoff performer as there is in hockey. If you need to hate this team, then Mr. Lemieux is your man.

Despite all of this, the Stanley Cup's final round has failed to rouse even the hockey purists, who seem to gripe about the state of the game almost as often as the masses who claim it's impossible to follow the puck. Both the Stars and the Devils are defensive specialists who can choke the pace out of a game by clogging up space on the ice.

After Game 2 at the Meadowlands, the reviews were not good. "A slumber-fest," said The New York Times . And in the days to come, there was more of the usual stuff about hockey's dismal TV ratings.

In a move that smelled a bit desperate, ABC brought in Al Michaels to add a little ceremony to its broadcasts of the Stanley Cup finals, to make them seem like a big deal. But even though Mr. Michaels made the most famous call in American hockey history (He ended his play-by-play of the U.S. win over the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics with the memorable phrase: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"), he has seemed out of place in the rabid air of a Stanley Cup arena.

But the old regulars fit in fine. After Game 2, in a corridor outside the Devils' locker room, ABC color man Bill Clement, a former player who looks a little like Ivan Lendl, ambled by in a double-breasted suit, carrying a worn brown leather valise. He had just gone off the air.

Asked what the Devils would need to do to make Manhattanites care, he said, "They need to develop some glamorous players. This is what New Yorkers respond to: glamour." As he said this, a button popped off his jacket and fell to the floor. "But the Devils are philosophically opposed to the type of system that generates someone of star caliber. Their system works against fan cultivation."

"But, gosh," he went on, "it's interesting that we're talking about a team catching on, when they've been here since 1982."

Welcome to the National Hockey League, Mr. Steinbrenner.

In 1959–when Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe were red-hot–one of the finest and most important American films was released, did well, won an award or two (like the New York Film Critics' selection of James Stewart as best actor) and then passed from the scene. But it should be required viewing for anyone who cares about such things as true quality in picture making, a few of America's best aspects, our complicated judicial system and life's generally ambiguous pathways. Co-starring Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara (only his second film), George C. Scott (his first big role), Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden, and the national hero, Joseph N. Welch (the man who brought down Joe McCarthy) as the judge, the film is Otto Preminger's totally enthralling and superb adaptation of Robert Traver's best seller founded on a true story of rape, murder and the trial, Anatomy of a Murder [Wednesday, May 20, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 10 P.M.] .

That Robert Traver is a pseudonym for the actual defendant's lawyer in this case, that the entire movie was shot on the real locations in upper Michigan where it happened, and that Preminger was first trained as a lawyer–his father being Attorney General of Austria and one of its most famous attorneys–helps to give the work its pervasive feeling of truth. Stewart gives a performance of absolutely perfect pitch. Though he was among the top five stars of the 50's, Anatomy was the peak in popularity for his career and one of the last roles of significance he was to have. All the other performances, down to the bits, are right up there with Stewart, the movie being a kind of seamless blending and contrast of young and older star actors, a Preminger trademark at its zenith. His best and most personal film, it also features a unique, utterly fresh score, one of only two ever composed by the innovative and incomparable Duke Ellington (who appears briefly at a piano bar).

The picture also had a tremendous impact on the freedom of the screen: After getting taboo words like "virgin" and "pregnant" into his otherwise innocuous The Moon Is Blue (1953), and being the one to finally address drug addiction, with Sinatra in one of his most powerful dramatic portrayals, in The Man With the Golden Arm (1956), Preminger dealt Hollywood's Production Code the coup de grâce with Anatomy , as America's own Jimmy Stewart uses words like "penetration," "panties" and "spermatogenesis." Indeed, accepting the role was a measure of Stewart's artistic conscience: Though many of his heartland fans objected to what they saw, Stewart told me once there was no way he "could turn down a part as good as that." The theme of the movie, spoken by Stewart, that people are neither all good nor all bad, is worth remembering daily.

Other do-not-misses, but more on them anon: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne in John Ford's poetic and heartbreaking 1945 World War II combat drama, They Were Expendable [Monday, May 25, TCM, 82, 5:30 P.M.] . Two, count 'em, two rare James Cagney musts: In the light but touching vein, with Olivia de Havilland and a young Rita Hayworth in Raoul Walsh's nostalgic 1941 classic, The Strawberry Blonde [Saturday, May 23, TCM, 8 P.M.] ; and Cagney, darker, more reckless and 10 years younger, in Howard Hawks' fast-paced 1932 racetrack-rivalry-between-brothers drama, The Crowd Roars [Sunday, May 24, TCM,3P.M.] .

Wednesday, May 20

After summoning his spirit from the beyond, Cher does the next best thing, hosting a TV tribute to her late husband, with Sonny & Me: Cher Remembers . [WCBS, 2, 8 P.M.]

Again with the Seinfeld finale ? O.K., so it wasn't so hot. It was too long and disgustingly self-congratulatory. Writer Larry David didn't give the four main players enough to do. And when they started cracking wise during the carjacking scene, they seemed more like characters in some rococo black comedy than themselves. The best scene was the tacked-on ending, added at the last moment by Jerry Seinfeld (without Mr. David's input), of Jerry doing a stand-up routine in prison. "Anybody here from cell block D?" That was nice. The rest we could have done without. Still, Seinfeld leaves behind seven years (out of nine) of good solid comedy. [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]

Julia Roberts shows off all her Julia Roberts-ishness on tonight's edition of In the Wild . You will experience tender emotions as Miss Roberts gives a bottle to a three-month-old orangutan baby. You will shudder as a 400-pound brute takes Miss Roberts in a hug–and won't let her go! Old-time Hollywood producers, watching from run-down rest homes, will be shouting at the TV: "That girl is magic! I want her in my next picture!" [WNET, 13, 8 P.M.]

With not much on its prime time schedule (we keep trying to like Everybody Loves Raymond , but it's kinda hard to pay attention), CBS opens its vaults for CBS: The First 50 Years and airs some of the best sitcom stuff ever (clips from I Love Lucy , The Andy Griffith Show , The Mary Tyler Moore Show ), moments from its glorious 80's soaps and examples of its trademark authoritative news reporting. (So what the hell happened?) [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Six young celebrities field softball questions and show off their magnificent homes for Barbara Walters on Six to Watch . All of the guests either work for ABC (Jenna Elfman) or need some public relations help (Kobe Bryant is trying to make himself a palatable commercial pitchman after another season of showboating; David Spade has the personality of … David Spade; Jon Bon Jovi is trying to put his bad-hair past behind him and become an actor ; Minnie Driver has some kind of general celebrity attitude problem; and Rupert Everett would like to play straight roles). Well, they've come to the right interviewer. [WABC, 7, 10 P.M.]

Thursday, May 21

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky made the indie documentaries Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost . Now, they're stepping into prime time with Where It's At: The "Rolling Stone" State of the Union . With Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner producing, they interviewed Beck, Bruce Springsteen, Jewel, Sean (Puffy) Combs and lots of unfamous people, too. "It's a dream job for a documentarian to get a decent budget and to travel around the world talking to people," said Mr. Sinofsky. "In an ideal world, I would have loved to do a road movie that has a story with structures and themes, but what an opportunity to do a show that will be seen by millions. We think it's a really good piece of TV, and we worry because TV execs low-ball the American public. They think of them as Joe Six-Pack, and it was very good for ABC to say, you know, 'We'll take a chance, it will be human beings talking about what's important to them.'" …

"My only disappointment about doing a network TV show like this was that, if we were on our own, I think we would have delved into the extremes," said Mr. Berlinger. "We would have liked to present a wider range of situation. We would have gone a little deeper into the murkier corners of the country … It's hard to get a two-hour prime time special on TV with your vision intact." [WABC, 7, 9 P.M.]

Friday, May 22

Who said the kids have short attention spans? MTV's nightly sex advice show, Loveline , is the least visually appealing thing on TV. The hosts are sitting there taking phone calls, and half the time you can't hear what the callers are saying, and then they kind of ramble on and on with their advice, with one guy trying to be cheeky and blunt, and the other one trying to be professionally bland. It goes on and on, an hour every night, but the kids watch it, so go figure. [MTV, 20, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, May 23

Tonight on Baywatch (yes, it's still on the air), Mitch (that's David Hasselhoff) finally decides to marry. First in a two-parter. Somewhere, in a small town in Germany, the little girls are weeping. [UPN, 9, 7 P.M.]

Sunday, May 24

NYTV correspondent Nick Paumgarten reports: Stan Fischler, a.k.a. the Hockey Maven, is a Brooklyn-born hockey aficionado who has written over 60 books about the game. He has also served as a color commentator on National Hockey League broadcasts since 1975. During this past season, he turned up all over the place as a roving interviewer and critic during cable broadcasts of Rangers, Islanders and Devils games. But when the Rangers and Islanders failed to make the playoffs and the heavily favored Devils got dumped in the first round, Mr. Fischler suddenly found himself facing an idle spring.…

So NYTV turned to Mr. Fischler to find out what to watch for in Game 1 of the conference final between the Dallas Stars and the winner of the St. Louis-Detroit series: "You look for strange players," he said. "Dallas has one of the strangest players in hockey in [defenseman] Craig Ludwig. He's about a thousand years old. His pads are wider than goalie pads. How he's getting away with illegal pads like that I don't know. And he looks like he shouldn't be playing in a helmet, like he doesn't want to be playing in a helmet. He looks like he just got hauled out of a tavern, and they said, Hey, we got a pickup game. Come out and play.…

"And, of course, the other thing that's so fascinating about Dallas is the coach [Ken Hitchcock]. The guy was 400 pounds at one time! You know that, right? He weighed 400 pounds! This guy is one of the greatest testimonials to dieting in the history of the world. I guess it's six years now that he's been dieting. I'd say he's 200-plus these days, but he's at least acceptable now. He was a joke when he was working as an assistant coach for the Flyers. They said he'd never make it because he'd be mocked by too many players.…

"And, obviously, there's the superstar, Mike Modano. He's one of the elite six in the league. Plus, he's got personality. You talk to him, it's like you just opened up a seltzer bottle. There's something nice and bubbly about him, and he's an American. He has buck teeth, and so do I. That's why I like him. Neither of us have used braces.…

"Another thing about Hitchcock: He's got his mustache … I've gotta tell you a funny story about a mustache. I grew up in Brooklyn and the first Dodger team I ever saw was in '37, when I was 5. The Dodgers had an infielder named Frenchy Bordagaray. His nickname was Frenchy. His real name was Stanley, which meant I automatically liked him. Another reason I liked him was that, like myself, he was Hungarian. So Frenchy, he showed up at training camp–remember, this was the 1930's–he showed up wearing a mustache and a goatee!"

Anyway, watch Messrs. Hitchcock, Modano and Ludwig, but not Bordagaray, continue their quest for the Stanley Cup. [WNYW, 5, 2 P.M.]

Monday,May 25

It's 4:45 A.M. If you are watching Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. , something is desperately wrong with you. [TBS, 22, 4:45 A.M.]

Tuesday, May 26

Mary Matalin and James Carville hire Jamie as their P.R. woman on Mad About You . Leah Oppenheim, a 23-year-old grad student at Bank Street College of Education, has been thinking a lot about Ms. Hunt and Mad About You lately, and, in general, the portrayal of Jews on TV, and she'll be teaching a course called "Is There Jewish Life on Television?" at the 14th Street Y this summer.…

"I'm going to do it thematically," she told NYTV. "I might take Jewish women as a theme and discuss Fran Drescher and how she fits into the tradition of Jewish women on TV. I don't like her stereotype–she's a little bit outrageous–but I think you can place her with Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice. Also, as far as I can discern, Helen Hunt is Jewish. It's funny to look at Mad About You , and she's playing the quintessential WASP. I mean, Jewish women can look like that, they can look like WASPs.… Another theme would be the way Jewish humor has become so integrated into American culture, but if you look at a show like Mad About You , Paul Reiser has always refused to identify his character as Jewish when all the humor on the show is derived from this idea of Jew and WASP.…

"I want to discuss stereotypes and to raise awareness. I want to keep adults and children aware of the constant barrage of media that we take in … I was thinking about the children's shows, and I never thought about it until recently, but there's no Jewish character on Sesame Street , which is a gross omission for a show that's supposed to be a mirror of New York City. Rugrats is a good example–it has this sort of bizarre state where everyone's Jewish and Christian at the same time. There's a grandfather who appears to be a Jew and they celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, but this is the world that kids live in today." [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]