THE BEGINNING
When people talk about what Eric Lindros and I have in common, the same thing keeps coming up: We both were drafted on June 22, 1991. After that the conversation usually turns to something else.
Joking aside, I can tell you that draft day means everything to a kid who has spent his whole life working to make it to the NHL. I still love watching the draft, maybe because I have some sense of what’s going on behind the scenes. Not just the scouting reports and the GMs’ fretting. I mean what’s going on as families sit around the kitchen table the night before and talk it all through for the thousandth time, weighing the questions of which team it’s going to be, and which round, and maybe whether it’s going to happen at all. If you want reality TV, that’s about as real as it gets, watching young men and their families live through the experience of having their dreams weighed and pronounced upon in public.
The draft that year was held at The Aud in Buffalo. My dad and I made the trek from Dryden to New York State, so we had a long time to talk about what might happen.
And to be honest, we didn’t have a clue what that might be. Since no one from my hometown had ever been drafted into the NHL, we had no reference point. No framework we could use to better prepare ourselves. I could tell my dad was a little nervous, though. Big Jim is not a big talker to begin with (nowadays he can’t hear jack shit, so he’s not much of a listener either), but he was eerily quiet on the flight to Toronto, and likewise he didn’t offer up much in the rental car from Toronto to Buffalo. Dad surely didn’t want to see me disappointed, so perhaps he was silent to avoid saying something that would get my hopes up. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t talking. I was, and still am, the exact opposite. When I’m nervous I’ll chatter your ear off like we’re a fivesome at ladies’ twilight. My Dad got an earful that day. I can’t remember what I was saying to him, but you can be sure it was just constant, useless ramblings. I can tell you that I was more excited than nervous. We were a couple of Dryden pioneers heading into the great unknown. Ready to pave the way for future NHLers from our little mill town. Or maybe we were just a couple of idiots driving to Buffalo.
I think I was ranked somewhere in the third or fourth round. But considering I lit up the CCHA for a monstrous three goals in my freshman year as a member of the Bowling Green Falcons, I wasn’t holding my breath. Usually, if a guy is going to be drafted it happens before he gets to college. That’s because just about everyone in the draft is eighteen—major junior players and guys about to go off to play NCAA. But since my birthday is in November, I was ineligible to be drafted before my first year of school. That means I would have been scouted as a seventeen-year-old playing against twenty-one-year-olds, and I didn’t exactly dominate. I don’t know that I would have been any better off playing in the OHL, though. In fact, I was so sure I wanted to go the college route that I told the OHL not to bother drafting me out of Midget—and every team seemed happy to respect my wishes. (Ever eager to follow in his big brother’s footsteps, Chris too told the league he wouldn’t report to an OHL team that drafted him. The Peterborough Petes seemed not to get the memo.)
Anyway, in college you get a lot more practice and far fewer games than you do in major junior, and I figured that kind of development would suit me better. (I would have been OK with scoring a few more goals, though.) Scouts are looking more for potential than for NHL-ready talent when they’re making their notes on a bunch of kids. Still, I’d have liked to think that three goals didn’t give a great sense of my potential.
Teams set up meetings with players before they invest in them—obviously, they want to get some sense of what kind of kid they’re bringing into the club. And, even more obviously, the more interesting you are as a player, the more interviews you get (unless you’re guaranteed to go with one of the top picks—then teams choosing lower won’t bother interviewing you). When I arrived in Buffalo I had a grand total of one meeting lined up. The Vancouver Canucks were the only ones bright enough to try to learn a little more about the man behind the man. I can still remember sitting in that hotel room with the brass from the Canucks—Pat Quinn, Brian Burke, and Mike Penny. At six-foot-three and 205 pounds, I was by far the smallest person in that room.
You’d think that since I had only one meeting I would remember the conversation that took place. Nope. I can say that it was a lot less formal than I had envisioned. For some reason I’d pictured it being more of an interview with the three of them on one side of the table and me all by myself on the other side. They’d show me flash cards, I’d provide an insightful answer, and they’d look at each other, nod, and pretend to write something down. As it turned out, it was a very relaxed setting. We sat in a circle around a coffee table having a casual conversation. It was nice and civilized, but I couldn’t help being intimidated by all three of them. Brian Burke was rocking his now-patented look of undone dress shirt with tie looking more like a scarf and a wad of chew in his mouth. Pat Quinn and Mike Penny were gnawing on a couple of foot-long stogies. They asked me things like, “What kind of player are you?” and “Why should we draft you?” As a relatively young player I didn’t find those to be easy questions to answer. If only I’d had the balls to come back with, “like Wayne Gretzky, and because I’m awesome.” The one thing that does stand out from that meeting was Brian Burke commenting on my sportcoat and tie. He said he knew I had just arrived and he appreciated the effort to look half decent for the interview. I thought that was pretty cool of him to notice. (And, for the record, my sportcoat was green. This detail will come back to bite me in the ass, as you’ll hear later in the book.)
When Big Jim and I arrived at the draft we looked like a couple of tourists. We were wide-eyed, our heads on swivels, and we clearly had no idea where to go. Most of the players in attendance had agents who had been through this a hundred times before. Big Jim and I had only seen it on TV. Not knowing where to go, we just sat with the spectators. As the players were drafted it became easy to figure out where most of the picks were sitting. And it was nowhere near the two of us. (Author’s note: In life, it’s always the older brother paving the way for the younger one. Because of my draft experience, things ran a little more smoothly for Chris a couple years later. By the way, Snaggletooth—you’re welcome.)
It didn’t really matter much where we sat, because all eyes at the ’91 draft were fixed upon the “Big E.” Eric Lindros was already labelled the Next One. He had the size and skill to dominate the NHL for the next two decades. The only question was whether he’d be doing this dominating in a Quebec Nordiques jersey. It was all the pundits talked about leading up to the draft. And sure enough, when the Nordiques made Lindros the number one pick it was almost as if the draft were over. He walked up to the stage (which, I’m told, is where the first-round picks go), grabbed his sweater but didn’t put it on, shook hands with Nordiques GM Pierre Page, smiled for the cameras, and left the stage. As he walked away the entire press section followed. Most of them returned about twenty minutes later. It’s a good thing they came back, otherwise they would’ve missed seeing some pretty good players get picked—Scott Niedermayer, Peter Forsberg, and Alexei Kovalev, to name a few.
There was some discussion about who would go second. When the San Jose Sharks called out Pat Falloon’s name I had to smile. I’d played against him in the Manitoba Midget AAA hockey league a few years back. (For a small-town kid like me it always makes for great barstool chit-chat when you can say you played against someone when you were a kid. “Hey, can you pass me a beer? Did I tell you about the time I played against Pat Falloon? I did? Are you sure? Anyway, he was playing for Shoal Lake and I.…”) The fifth pick in the draft was Aaron Ward. You young kids out there know him as a TV star now. I had played against him the previous year when he was a freshman at Michigan and I was a freshman at Bowling Green. Was I envious watching guys I had competed against go so high in the draft? Not at all. I was thinking that these guys are good hockey players—but they’re not that great. If I could play with them, maybe I had a shot.
Considering I had met with only one team prior to the draft I was fairly certain I wasn’t going in the first round. But part of me got a little nervous when Vancouver was about to make the seventh overall pick. Teams had taken a flyer on a player before, hadn’t they?
“With the seventh pick in the 1991 entry draft the Vancouver Canucks are happy to select [wait for it…] Alek Stojanov.” Stojanov turned out to be a great pick for the Canucks. He played only sixtytwo games for the franchise and scored exactly zero goals, but he was eventually flipped for another struggling first-round pick from ’91 named Markus Naslund, who went on to score 346 goals in a Canucks uniform. That’s the thing about a high pick. You could get a guy who never plays a game in the league, or you could end up with M. Naslund. Or you could get S. Pronger. But the Canucks didn’t, at least not then.
No problem, on to round two.
When Brian Burke and company stood up for their second-round pick about 20 percent of me started to get excited. They went with Jassen Cullimore. I guess three goals didn’t warrant a second-round pick. Now it didn’t matter that I hadn’t allowed myself to get my hopes up too far. It’s not a great feeling to have the team you’re hoping for basically announce to a rink full of media, fans, agents, hockey players and their families that they would rather have someone else.
Still, I had to put it in perspective. I was sitting with my dad at the NHL entry draft and there was a good chance I would eventually be selected. How many kids would love to trade places with me? OK, I can tell you at least one who wouldn’t have. But while he was smiling for the cameras, my dad gave me a tap on the knee and told me that the Canucks wouldn’t pass me over again. I’m not sure I believed him. After the Cullimore pick I began to think that anyone could take me. Even though I tried to keep myself in check, I realized I was going through an agonizing cycle of hope and despair with each pick. I figured I could be taken anywhere from the third round to (gulp) not at all. It could have been a long day. Luckily, it wasn’t.
I went through twenty-one ups and downs after the Canucks’ second pick. Jamie McLennan, Dmitri Filimonov, Yanick Dupre ... were these guys better than me? Somebody thought so. Somebody who was paid to know how to judge a hockey player. (I scored more goals in the NHL than all these guys, by the way. But then, McLennan was a goalie.) No dose of humility is quite like sitting through a couple rounds of the draft and being given a list of all the players your age that the NHL’s general managers would rather have on their team.
But my trajectory toward humiliation eventually came to an end.
“With the fifty-first pick the Vancouver Canucks select Sean Pronger from Bowling Green State University.”
I hugged my dad (if by “hugged” I mean “squeezed the crap out of”), and told him “We did it!” I wish I could tell you that I thanked him for all he had done for me. Thanked him for all the early morning practice sessions, the new equipment, the pep talks, the sacrifices, for everything—but I didn’t. I was too stunned. I really hadn’t prepared myself for what it would feel like to actually be drafted. I had talked and daydreamed about the moment a million times but I guess I never thought about what I would do if and when my name was called. It felt great, though, and I could tell my dad was proud. And, as every kid knows, there is nothing better than making your father proud.
After our brief celebration, I turned to Big Jim. “How in hell do we get down to the arena floor?” (Reminder to self for the next time I’m drafted: sit in the lower bowl.)
Eventually, we managed to talk our way down to the arena floor where the teams were assembled. It took us so long that guys drafted four or five picks after me were already in line for draft pictures. As we made our way onto the draft floor, I could see Steve Tambellini, from the Vancouver management team, peering up into the stands with a look of “I know he’s here somewhere, what the hell is he doing?” Steve congratulated me on being drafted and becoming a member of the Canucks organization, and escorted me over to the Canucks table to meet the rest of the management team as well as most of the scouting staff. From there it was on to pictures. They gave me a Canucks jersey and snapped photos of me in front of the NHL logo. That was pretty cool. Then they had Dad step in for some pictures. The photo of Big Jim and I standing there together is one of my favourites to this day.
Part one of the dream was now complete. I was happy to have a path to NHL glory, a franchise to lead to the Promised Land. The Vancouver Canucks were going to look like geniuses for stealing me in the third round. I was going to make all those other franchises look like fools for drafting the likes of Niedermayer, Forsberg, and Kovalev ahead of me. (Looking back, that was a ridiculously strong draft year—even without including Lindros, who of course went first overall to the Quebec Nordiques and subsequently shunned an entire province. We didn’t realize it as we were sitting there, but what we saw unfolding was the beginning of the process of Quebec City getting screwed—losing a guy who would dominate the league for years, losing their franchise only to watch it win in Denver. All we knew for sure was that we were watching a kid announce to the world that his dream was a lot bigger than playing in the NHL.) On the other hand, if any Vancouver Canucks fans are looking back, they’re probably not pleased that the likes of Michael Nylander, Mike Knuble, and Sean O’Donnell were selected after me. (I have to say, though, that twenty-two guys picked ahead of me played fewer games in the NHL than I did. Not that I’m counting.) Whatever. A Pronger had been drafted into the NHL, and it was a big day for the family.
When the draft wrapped up, Big Jim and I were invited back to the Canucks hospitality suite to mingle with the other picks and Vancouver’s hockey operations staff. It was a relaxed event and everyone seemed to be in a good mood. The draft is a stressful time for all involved. Owners, general managers, scouts, coaches, support staff, players, parents, siblings—once it’s over, people want to let their hair down. Or so I thought. Since there were some cold brews in my vicinity I grabbed one and headed over for a conversation with Stojanov and Cullimore. After pretty much shotgunning my first beer I glanced down and noticed the two other guys were sipping on Cokes. I put down my empty can right before a scout came over and told the three of us it would be OK if we wanted to have a beer. Really? Don’t mind if I do.