Ex-Oilers GM disappointed by Pronger’s explanation of long-debated trade out of Edmonton

Former NHL defenceman Chris Pronger in 2015, left, and former Edmonton Oilers executive Kevin Lowe in 2017 in a composite photo.

Urban legends have a tendency to linger.

That’s often because the real stories behind them are not verified.

And that’s where the rumour mill comes in. It forever spins.

It’s funny how flames can be fanned years, even decades, later.

Case in point this week: Chris Pronger and an excerpt from his book published in The Athletic, the online sports news entity underwritten by the New York Times.

In Earned: The True Cost of Greatness from One of Hockey’s Fiercest Competitors, released Tuesday, the Hockey Hall of Fame defenceman recounts the scene in the summer of 2005 when he found out he’d been traded to the Edmonton Oilers by the St. Louis Blues and how he’d quickly signed a contract extension with his new team.

Pronger writes that the decision to sign the five-year, $31.25-million deal, made while drunk after a friend’s birthday party, was a mistake.

When his agent called him that night he was at a friend’s birthday party, Pronger said he had heard rumours the trade destination could be Los Angeles, Florida or “maybe Boston.”

“Edmonton? Nobody mentioned f—ing Edmonton,” he writes.

On Wednesday, a principal figure in the drama that was the top-flite defenceman’s 11-month sojourn in Canada expressed his disappointment in how Pronger is framing the story.

While Kevin Lowe, then the Oilers’ general manager, credited Pronger for owning up “for making a personal decision in the middle of the night that impacted his family,” he took offence at “how casually Edmonton is folded into that story as though it were merely an inconvenience tied to what Pronger now describes as a ‘drunken decision.’

“Looking back, hearing how he frames it today, I find myself wishing I had handled it differently,” Lowe wrote in a social media post.

“Quite frankly, I wish I had said no and let him sit out rather than accommodate a decision he now seems so quick to diminish.”

Pronger reveals in the book excerpt that he agreed to the extension in an hour-long negotiation session on the phone overnight while Lauren, his wife, was asleep.

“I should’ve said no,” Pronger recalls. “Should’ve said I need to sleep on it. Should’ve said I need to talk to my wife. Instead, sitting in my home office, several more beers deep, we started negotiating. By 2 a.m., I’d agreed to five years.”

Long story short, Pronger said Lauren the next morning was understandably unhappy that she was not consulted about the five-year commitment, that they’d talked the night before about signing a qualifying contract for one year in Edmonton.

“This wasn’t about some of the bulls— rumours that never happened,” Pronger writes, downplaying long-festering gossip that the reason for his eventual trade the next summer was due to an extramarital affair or that Lauren hated living in Canada.

“This was about me making a massive life decision at 2 a.m. without consulting my partner.”

He said he knew by November that year, one month into the season that saw the Oilers unexpectedly make it to the Stanley Cup Final, that “it wasn’t working” for him.

“Not the team … the situation. The promise I’d failed to keep,” Pronger writes.

He asked his agent to “figure out” a trade to a different team. The Oilers pulled off the shocking deal sending Pronger to the Anaheim Ducks shortly after the Stanley Cup run in ’06. The defenceman would win the Cup a year later.

Lowe, however, said he doesn’t buy Pronger’s explanation given what he experienced that year.

“What makes this even harder to reconcile is what followed immediately after,” Lowe writes. “The day after the agreement, I received a personal note from his wife expressing how excited they both were about coming to Edmonton. That sentiment doesn’t align with the version of events being portrayed now.

“Perhaps at the time he was trying to reset the narrative or distance himself from circulating rumours, but it stands in stark contrast to what’s being shared today.”

Lowe, the Oilers’ first NHL draft pick in 1979 who won the Stanley Cup five times with them over his Hockey Hall of Fame career before coaching, managing and running the club, defended Edmonton, calling the city “first class,” its hockey tradition “proud” and its fans “passionate.”

“(Edmonton) is not a punchline, and it is not something to be explained away years later,” he writes.

“It deserves better than that and so do the people who supported (Pronger) while he was here.”