Update on Bolt Prospects Preliminary Rankings

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.

Because of the immigration issues with the four signees in Norfolk and the ongoing saga of Andreas Karlsson's injury and the effect any potential demotions might have on our rankings, we decided to wait a week to see if those situations would sort themselves out in a timely fashion. They have not. So, for the last week we have been working on putting the list together and we completed it Monday night in a two hour session where we went through the rankings produced by tabulating our individual rankings position by position.

However, we have decided to postpone release of the rankings until after this weekend. We reached consensus fairly quickly on the top-12 players in the rankings, but spots 13-20 were somewhat more controversial. This is largely due to the fact that it's very difficult to place many of the young forwards currently in Norfolk because they achieved so very little last season as a group. So the decision we have made is to hang onto the list until after my trip to Norfolk this weekend to see if the couple of games against Binghamton reveal anything that would fundamentally alter our rankings in these spots.

We fully understand that you can't base an evaluation of a player on two games alone. That's not what is going to happen this weekend and we have no intention of dropping a player five spots based on a couple of bad games.

However, if one prospect were to have a stellar weekend in Norfolk on Friday and Saturday, there is easily room for a prospect to move up two or three spots. So, hopefully guys like Marek Kvapil, Mike Egener, Radek Smolenak, and Chris Lawrence will put their best foot forward in the home opening weekend for the Admirals.

Bottom line, expect Bolt Prospects to release its Preliminary Rankings early next week.