Wayne Simmonds denies making homophobic slur toward Sean Avery

We know all about how Wayne Simmonds and Sean Avery made acquaintances last night in the most awkward of ways as Simmonds allegedly hurled a homophobic slur at Avery in the heat of battle. While Simmonds had a meeting with Colin Campbell this morning to discuss the incident and what went down.

The guy we haven’t heard from about this whole mess was Wayne Simmonds himself. Today after practice, Simmonds did talk about things and Philly.com’s Sam Carchidi was on the spot with what went down.

Flyers winger Wayne Simmonds strongly denied Sean Avery’s claim that he directed a gay slur at the Rangers’ forward in Monday’s exhibition game.

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Simmonds said he became incensed when he heard Avery say, “I really don’t want to have to kill f—ing (Claude) Giroux,” among other comments.

All right, all right… He said, he said incidents are all fun and games, but Simmonds was pretty clearly busted on video saying something terrible to Avery. Unless Simmonds was saying something you’d hear in a poorly dubbed movie on basic cable, it’s pretty clear that he was saying what we think he said to Avery.

Fessing up to saying something like that is difficult for anyone to do, but it’s probably better for Simmonds to not say anything about what happened rather than say something where we can point to the video evidence and say differently. We’ll see if the NHL has anything to say about the whole thing but it seems inevitable that Simmonds will get fined for the outburst.