Hatcher and Pronger, Once the Future

From time to time I like to take a stroll around the Sports Illustrated Vault on SI.com. It can be funny to look back with 15 years of perspective on some articles that are written about a then young, now old, NHL super stud. And just like last time we strolled down memory vault, I'm talking about Chris Pronger.

I came across this article today from 1996 that was pretty much just trying to highlight the fact that there were some pretty talented defensemen entering the league. What piqued my interest the wasn't the opening commentary on a 20 year old Ed Jovanaski going toe-to-toe with Eric Lindros in the playoffs, and surprisingly wasn't even the praise of a young and poised Chris Pronger. It was the third young defenseman they profiled, a guy named Derian Hatcher, that really made me do a double take.

First of all I had no idea that Hatcher was ever young, I pretty much though he had been 36 his whole life. And secondly, for 3 year's I've considered Derian Hatcher to be more or less a fossil. I know Flyers fans loved him and I thought he was alright too, but he's been so old and so immobile for so long that it shocked me to see him and a guy we just signed for 7 years in the same old dusty article in Sports Illustrated. Granted, the article's author, the venerable Michael Farber, is profiling a 21 year old Pronger and a 24 year old Hatcher, but it just kind of makes me wonder how one of them is claiming to be in the prime of his career and the other can hardly walk.

This is kind of a sidebar, but what also surprised me is this sentence fragment - "If Jovanovski, Pronger and Hatcher are the next two-way defensive stars...." I mean, it's just a little funny,right? That someone would ever write that sentence about Derian Hatcher?

Anyway, Hatch's older brother, Kevin, played until he was 35, which is about as long as a guy played back then. D Hatch made it to his 36th birthday, just about, but could hardly move when all was said and done and now has a Tiger Woods 2000 knee in his leg. It'll be interesting to see what happens with this long Prongtract. It's gotta make you wonder, no matter what he says, when a kid who played a very similar style to him and was tagged with him as an up-an-coming defensive force back in 1996 is spending his days rehabbing for golf and Pronger's preparing for 7 more seasons.