For short time, Chris Pronger meant a ton to Flyers

Ian Laperriere knew he was at the end of his career in the summer of 2009 when he was mulling offers as a free agent.

Most teams wanted him to come in and mentor some of the younger players, but there wasn’t a legitimate shot at winning a Stanley Cup.

Then he remembered…the Flyers had traded for and signed Chris Pronger, the menacing defenseman he knew well from battles on the ice and from playing together in St. Louis when they were in their early 20s.

“When Philly called me when I was a free agent, that was a sign that (then general manager) Paul Holmgren was putting a team together to go all the way,” said Laperriere, now a Flyers assistant coach. “When you bring a guy in like that and you give him that extension, you know they’re serious. That’s why I came to Philly. They were going for it.”

Pronger, 41, spent only 145 games with the Flyers, not quite 13 percent of his career. For a short time, he meant everything to Philadelphia. Had he not been hit in the eye by Mikhail Grabovski’s stick in a game on Oct. 24, 2011, perhaps he would still be playing for the Flyers, perhaps still their captain.

Instead, the 6-foot-6 defenseman known as one of the NHL’s bad boys is going into the Hockey Hall of Fame Monday, inducted in a class with fellow players Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Phil Housley and Angela Ruggiero with Bill Hay and Peter Karmanos in the builder category.

It should also be no surprise that Pronger, no stranger to controversy, is allowed in the Hall despite technically being an active player due to a change last year to eligibility bylaws.

“It’s not a secret that not everybody likes him, but everybody respects him because of what he does on the ice,” Laperriere said. “At the end of the day, that’s what Prongs really cared about: ‘Respect me for what I can do for your team and that’s all I’m asking. I don’t want you to like me I don’t want you to love me, but I want you to respect me.’ He demanded respect, but at the end of the day he earned it with the way he showed up every night and the way he played. The bigger the challenge was, the bigger Chris Pronger was. Without him, there’s not a chance in the world we would have gone to the finals. No way.”

In 2010, the first year for Laperriere and Pronger with the Flyers, the team went to the Stanley Cup finals, losing to the Chicago Blackhawks in Game 6. Since Holmgren traded two players, two first-round picks and a conditional third rounder to get Pronger, the team finally had a bona fide stud on the blueline.

“Chris was an icon,” ex-Flyer Danny Briere recalled. “He would calm everything down. Every game you felt his presence. I think both teams would feel his presence, but having him in our dressing room, he was a calming presence. He was a confidence booster. He didn’t have to say anything. Just knowing that he was there, he was just such a confident person, confident player, you always felt like everyone was afraid of him.”

And most were. Even his teammates. On a few occasions he would verbally undress his teammates if he felt they weren’t up to snuff. That happened to current captain Claude Giroux a couple of times.

“I think it hurts, but I think it’s the truth,” Giroux said. “As a player you want to get better and you want to win. When he talks to you, you obviously won’t be happy with it, but the end result is going to be good. You’re going to be a better player and he’s said a couple things to me that really motivated me to be a better player.”

Pronger was a five-time All-Star who won both the Norris Trophy as the league’s best defenseman and the Hart Trophy as the league MVP in 2000, got a Stanley Cup ring with the Anaheim Ducks in 2007. When he spoke, everyone listened.

“Nobody’s perfect, but he brought that confidence,” Laperriere said. “When you have a big boy back there that can play big minutes, 30 minutes, he’s won before, knows what it takes to win, it helps everybody have an extra step in their walk and feel a little bit more confident. From Day 1 he did that. Prongs was a special player and people are going to look at him in the future and say he’s one of the top 10 defensemen who’s ever played the game.”

Then, one day, it all went away. In a game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Pronger took a high stick to the eye. It caused an ocular concussion that came with post-concussion syndrome. He somehow played five more games, but still hasn’t fully recovered.

Pronger now works for the NHL’s department of player safety, an unsurprising bend in the rules considering he’s still under contract. The player who was suspended eight times over his career is helping the league determine who else was as dirty as he was.

Ever since his playing days ended, the Flyers haven’t recovered either.

“That’s not an easy guy to replace,” general manager Ron Hextall said. “We’re all looking for No. 1 defensemen and I always say it: I don’t think there’s 30 in the league. By rights there is, but prototypical No. 1 defensemen I don’t think there’s 30 in the league. I think a lot of teams are looking for one.”

From Luke Schenn to Mark Streit, the Flyers haven’t been able to replace Pronger's gigantic role piecemeal either. Doing it in one piece was out of the question.

“You can’t do that,” Laperriere said. “You have to do that by committee. You can’t say you want to replace a big player, a Hall of Famer with one person. It takes maturity. It takes experience and he’s had a lot of that and you just can’t do that in one player. Usually those players, teams don’t want to trade them.”

Dave Isaac; (856) 486-2479; disaac@gannettnj.com .