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With the conclusion of the seasons for the Tampa Bay Lightning and its affiliate, the Syracuse Crunch, I wanted to share some news with you all. It is with a somewhat heavy heart that I write to tell you all that the 2024-2025 campaign was the last for Bolt Prospects. In February, I made the decision to tell our other co-founders, Tim and Chad, that I no longer had the time or technical capability to get the site back to the level we wanted it to be. At the conclusion of the regular season, we made the collective decision that at the end of the playoffs we would set a “go dark” date, and on June 1 we will be discontinuing the website, message board, and Discord social media channel. It is our intent to keep the Bolt Prospects web domain, and we may choose to do something else with the brand at a later date although at this time we don’t have any plans for the future.
We soft launched Bolt Prospects in the fall of 2004 in the wake of the Lightning’s first Stanley Cup championship and into the teeth of that year’s work stoppage. Disillusioned from working for a national outlet where we saw editorial decisions made to almost solely focus energy on the promotion of high draft picks and big market teams’ prospects, we wanted to tell the unique stories of all the Lightning’s players, including the less heralded ones, as they wound their ways from becoming draft picks and signees, through their developmental journeys in junior, college, and minor pro hockey, and all the way into the NHL. I count myself incredibly fortunate to have covered the ascent of roughly a hundred Bolt Prospects Alumni in that time, including the remarkable 2011-2012 Norfolk Admirals team that set a professional hockey record winning streak en route to capturing the Calder Cup and the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 Tampa Bay Lightning teams that captured back-to-back Stanley Cup Championships. It was absolutely as improbable, I think, as the chances of getting hit by lightning to have started a prospect site about this club just around the time the team was beginning a decade-long run of prospect acquisition and development, starting in and around 2007, that will probably go down as being historically unmatched by any other modern National Hockey League franchise. It included sure-fire future hall of famers Steven Stamkos, Victor Hedman, Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, and Andrei Vasilevskiy and a true Bolt Prospects original behind the bench, Jon Cooper, as well as future Lightning team hall of famers like Alex Killorn, Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat, and Anthony Cirelli.
Looking back on almost twenty-one years of history with the site, it’s also amazing to think about where I and my two co-founding partners started and where we’ve ended up in life. Some of us raised families. Some cultivated careers in our day jobs and now we even find ourselves building businesses. But, through all of the changes in our personal lives over two decades, the one constant has been the work and the joy of interacting with our readers and the Bolt Prospects community. It was an adventure, filled to the brim with stories both fantastic and, at times, absurd to last a lifetime.
With that in mind, in closing, I’d like to thank our families for their support and patience over the years. I’ve said it a few times, but one of my significant others’ favorite jokes to tell her friends is that between early fall and late spring she becomes a “hockey widow” every year. Nothing any of us has done would be possible without their love and support and their willingness to tolerate us pouring so much time into talking about grown men playing a kid’s game. We’d also like to thank our allies in the hockey world including the Tampa Bay Lightning franchise itself and some of the many folks who’ve said kind things about the site when they didn’t have to ranging from Dave Mishkin to Bob McKenzie. Finally, and most importantly, I’d like to thank our readers and all of you who participated in the various iterations of the Bolt Prospects community over the years. We cannot thank you enough for all that you’ve brought into our lives. It has been a remarkable privilege and an honor.
Good bye, and good luck.
PC et al,
Bolt Prospects
