Pronger debunks rumours and reveals real reason he left Edmonton Oilers
Twenty years after abruptly leaving the Edmonton Oilers, Chris Pronger has decided to clear the air on the reason why.
The Hall of Fame defender spent just a single season with the Oilers back during the 2005-06 season before forcing a trade to the Anaheim Ducks. That was despite signing a five-year contract extension with Edmonton the summer prior and making it to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final with the Oilers.
It was a saga that turned Pronger into public enemy number one among Oilers fans. Some still hold a grudge over him leaving, and while rumours circulated, the exact reason why he left wasn’t completely known—until now.
Pronger released an excerpt of his upcoming book, Earned, on The Athletic on Monday morning, where he described how a poorly thought-out drunken decision before he played a single game with the Oilers was ultimately what led to his departure.
“Lauren [my wife] and I had talked it through that night. We talked about signing my qualifying offer with Edmonton — a place Lauren had never even been to yet — and decided to give it a try for one year,” Pronger wrote. “Going from St. Louis to Edmonton for just one year? We could handle that. Then, we could evaluate and see what we wanted to do from there. Then she went to bed.”
That, however, is not how things played out for the Pronger family. Instead, the all-star defenceman got a call-back from his agent at 1 a.m. saying the Oilers wanted to negotiate a longer-term contract. Pronger wrote that he went to his office, had a few beers, and started negotiations without his wife.
The two sides reached an agreement in the early hours of that morning.
“By 2 a.m., I’d agreed to five years,” Pronger said. “Lauren went to bed thinking I would sign for one year. That was the plan. Test it out, see if Edmonton worked for our family, then decide. ‘Five Years,’ I told her the next morning. The silence that followed was louder than any arena crowd.”
“You made a five-year commitment about our lives without talking to me? While you were drunk?” His wife responded.
The 51-year-old went on to describe how this decision strained his marriage and started to eat away at the trust between the two. When Pronger left, many fans pointed the blame at his wife, an American, for supposedly hating Canada and forcing her way back to the United States.
Pronger pushed back on that notion and owned his mistake. It wasn’t long after he started his Oilers tenure that he decided it wasn’t going to work.
“I knew it wasn’t working by November. Not the team … the situation. The promise I’d failed to keep,” Pronger wrote. “I told my agent: ‘I’m done after this year. Start figuring out how to make it happen.’
“From November to June, I played every game knowing I was leaving.”
That wasn’t easy for Pronger, who wrote that he knew he was breaking the trust of a fanbase that was cheering him on. Yet, he pointed out that he had already broken a more important trust with his family and was focused on repairing that.
That still didn’t stop an onslaught of rumours blaming his wife for everything.
“None of the rumours were accurate. The truth was: I’d made a promise to my wife, broken it and spent a year trying to make it right,” Pronger wrote. “I could have stayed an Oiler. Could have played out the contract. Could have kept collecting checks. And destroyed my marriage.
“Instead, and I’ll say it (and do it) until the day I die: I choose family first.”
The scars of his decision to leave still run deep for sections of the fanbase, but things seem to have gotten better over the years. Pronger was at Rogers Place in the crowd during Game 5 of last year’s Stanley Cup Final and received a warm reception when shown on the Jumbotron.
Chris Pronger is in the house tonight and he gets a loud ovation by the #Oilers faithful pic.twitter.com/OzcVzEqM6g
— Preston Hodgkinson (@NHLHodgkinson) June 15, 2025
With added context, it makes sense why Pronger opted to leave the Oilers after just a single season. It doesn’t seem to have been for any dislike of Edmonton, but rather a more personal reason behind the scenes.
Still, fans will always wonder what could have been if Pronger ended up staying for four more seasons in the Alberta capital.