(Ed. Note: It’s the NHL Alternate History project! We’ve asked fans and bloggers from 31 teams to pick one turning point in their franchise’s history and ask ‘what if things had gone differently?’ Trades, hirings, firings, wins, losses, injuries … all of it. How would one different outcome change the course of history for an NHL team? Today: Kelly Hinkle from Broad Street Hockey on the Philadelphia Flyers!)

By Kelly Hinkle

As a Philadelphia Flyers fan, one lives life navigating a minefield of ‘what-ifs.’

I’ve been following this team since the mid-90s, and in that time the team has rarely been actually bad. They’re usually close – really close – to being a team that can win a Cup. And it’s the closeness that really makes us suffer. Because it seems like every failed season, every playoff exit, every massive disappointment hangs on one or two small events. One or two things that, had they gone the other way, the Flyers would’ve been marching down Broad Street.

What if Eric Lindros had kept his head up more? What if the Flyers signed Curtis Joseph? What if Peter Laviolette picked a goalie and stuck with him? My head hurts just thinking about it. But in the last ten years,

I think there is one event that, if it had gone differently, would’ve changed things in a major way:

What if Chris Pronger had never gotten hurt?

Pronger came to the Flyers on the first day of the 2009 Entry Draft, in a trade which sent the now-unremarkable Joffrey Lupul and Luca Sbisa to Anaheim along with two first round picks. At the time, Lupul was a 25-goal scorer and Sbisa was thought to be a pretty highly-rate prospect, so there was some concern about sending that all away for a 34-year old defenseman with one year left on his contract. But all it took was one press conference for Chris to win over Flyers fans (it’s not hard, just tell us you love us) and just a few days after the trade, GM Paul Holmgren signed Pronger to a seven year extension that ensured Chris Pronger would retired in the orange and black.

At that point, the stage was set. The Flyers were a team pretty loaded with young front-end talent and now they had one of the best defensemen in the league anchoring the blueline. And it worked! The Flyers made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final in Pronger’s first season with the team – that was kind of Chris’ thing, dragging his new team to the Final – and despite losing to the Blackhawks in six games, the future was bright for the Flyers. Pronger played only 50 games that next season, due to a number of injuries, most notably to his knee. The Flyers lost in the second round to the Bruins, and it was on to the offseason. Despite falling short in the 2010-2011 season, this was still a team with a talented young core and a relatively solid defense.

We were still good, right?

Well uh … Paul Holmgren blew up the team that offseason, but that’s a whole other set of ‘what-ifs.’

The Flyers headed into the following season with Chris Pronger as their new captain and a whole new set of talented young forwards on which we all could hang our hopes and dreams. Any optimism that Flyers fans had that season was short-lived, as just 8 games into the season Pronger took a stick up high from Toronto Maple Leafs’ center Mikhail Grabovski and things were never the same. After the November 19 game against the Jets, Pronger would never play again.

But what if that never happened? It’s an interesting question, because there are a number of terrible decisions made by the Flyers that can be traced directly to the loss of Chris Pronger, but there are also a number of pretty dang good things that are currently happening on this team as a result of losing Chris Pronger.

In typical Philadelphia fashion, let’s start with the bad.

With a hole in the defense and Pronger out for the season, Paul Holmgren needed to pick up a defensemen to fill his place. On February 16, 2012, the Flyers acquired Nicklas Grossmann from the Dallas Stars in exchange for a 2012 second-round pick and 2013 third-round pick. With one of those picks, Dallas selected Devin Shore, who broke into the NHL last season putting up 33 points in 82 games. Dallas traded the third round pick, along with Brenden Morrow, to Pittsburgh. The Penguins used that pick to land Jake Guentzel, who went absolutely nuts this year in the playoffs.