Pete Choquette's blog

Lightning defenseman Doug Janik mid-pummelling of Carolina forward Craig Adams in tonight's 6-1 Lightning win over the Hurricanes. He looks eeeeeeeee-vil!

Photo courtesy yahoo images.

Lightning prospect defenseman Jay Rosehill smacking around Hershey agitator Louis Robitaille like a little... well, this is a family website.

Thanks to the fine folks in the Norfolk media relations department and our own Tim Bennett, I'm going to get the opportunity to interview Admirals Head Coach Stirling and Admirals GM/Lightning Assistant GM Claude Loiselle Saturday morning before/after the morning skate.

So, with that in mind, I'm throwing this open to the readers: are there any particular questions you'd like answered about the Admirals or the Lightning prospect system? I'll have the laptop and, supposedly, high speed internet at the hotel so feel free to post your suggestions today, tonight, and all Friday and I'll try to run them by Coach and Claude.

As readers of this site know, we typically release our annual Preliminary Rankings of the Lightning's prospects around the first week of October once Lightning camp breaks. Obviously we haven't done that yet, so I just wanted to give everyone an update on where we are.

It's hard not to be excited about the Lightning's 2-0 start, and I just wanted to expand on some thoughts I had after tonight's dominating effort against Atlanta. The big concern I think we all had coming into the year was how Dan Boyle's injury was going to effect the team. Boyle has been the tempo setter for this team ever since he was acquired in the 2001-2002 season, and as one of only two righty shot defensemen in the organization (AHLer David Schneider being the other) his minutes on the power play were going to be very difficult to replace. If you had held a gun to my head and asked me how the team would do over this first month, I probably would've said about .500, maybe a tad below, without Boyle. Now they're 2-0 heading into a two game set against an 0-2 Panthers team with the chance to get off to a really good start. Granted, things can change in a hurry and the team still will probably need to weather at least another three weeks without Danny (and he might not be 100% for a long time even after he returns). However, I can't help starting to think about how if this team gets off to a great first month of the season without Boyle, think how good they'll be when he returns?