Trading Places

Chris Pronger is about to move. Again.

The towering defenseman with the booming slap shot is getting out of a city. Again.

This time, the only ones who are paying attention to the Prongers packing up their longtime St. Louis home for Orange County are the movers. "Time to cut the cord," Pronger says with a confident smile.

No, there'll be no more drama. This journey for the Ducks' newest star is about finding contentment.

On and off the ice.

"It'll be a little different," he says with an easy cool as he awaits lunch at an Anaheim restaurant. "At the end of the day, it's still hockey. You still got to go out there and perform.

"Just because you're down in Southern California with a beach right there and you have the opportunity to lay on it, you still got to put the work and the time in to prepare."

The goal hasn't changed but much has in a short time.

It was only about six weeks ago that Pronger was leading the upstart Edmonton Oilers in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. They lost to the Carolina Hurricanes but won the hearts of their fans, who finally had a superstar to call their own.

The love affair, however, ended badly.

Within days of losing the Cup, Pronger asked to be traded for "personal reasons."

He still will not elaborate except to say, "It's something I had to do."

By July 3, he belonged to the Ducks in a transaction orchestrated by General Manager Brian Burke that shook the hockey world.

"He usually likes to make a splash," Pronger says of Burke, whom he has known for years.

But Oilers fans by then were seething, and a rough, circuslike atmosphere quickly enveloped the 6-foot-6 defenseman.

For the Ducks, the change was palpable. Over the next three days, they received several hundred calls seeking season-ticket packages. It quickly became clear that, for the first time in its 14-year history, the team is regarded as a serious Cup contender.

The Ducks made it to the Western Conference finals last season with proven stars Scott Niedermayer and Teemu Selanne, experienced veterans Rob Niedermayer, Todd Marchant and Sean O'Donnell and a roster brimming with talented young forwards. The 31-year-old Pronger, who helped stopped the Ducks' advance toward the Cup, is seen as the missing piece.

"That's good," Pronger says of the sky-high expectations. "You look at teams like Detroit, Colorado and New Jersey. Those teams expect to win every year. They didn't win it every year, but they expected to win and their fans expected them to win. That's the level you want to get to."