Actually, this makes the contract not as bad, and actually gives us some room to work with this season come deadline. Once Pronger "retires" aka can't play anymore due to injury he goes on LTIR and we get credits towards the cap for his salary every year. That's a huge win for the Flyers for the next few years considering how bad he's been when he's played. And for this year we're going to have like 3.5m in credits by the time the deadline comes along so if Homer thinks Giroux will be healthy and we can make a playoff run he can get a pretty damn good rental that we may actually be able to sign next season.
So yeah, on one level this really sucks. Pronger can be great and brings something really important to the team. However, he hasn't been playing well lately and this potentially solves the problem that everyone has seen coming for years with Pronger's ridiculous cap hit late in his career.