TAMPA — The Tampa Bay Lightning hired Pierre-Edouard Bellemare as a player development specialist Thursday, bringing the 41-year-old back to the franchise where he played from 2021 to 2023 and reached the 2022 Stanley Cup Final.
Bellemare retired this summer after 700 NHL games, a 10-year NHL career and captaining France at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics in February, where he averaged 18:24 of ice time over four games and scored a goal. He will work alongside Director of Player Development JP Cote and Syracuse Crunch staff to develop forward prospects.
Lightning head coach Jon Cooper planted the seed years ago. Bellemare said the coaching conversation started after Cooper told media during Bellemare’s time in Tampa that “one of the guys who is kind of ready for coaching would be Belly.” Multiple NHL teams inquired about adding Bellemare to their staffs in recent years, but Tampa won out.
“It was a perfect fit because we had planned to move back to Tampa with the family, and a couple years ago we talked about wouldn’t it be cool to be able to work with with the franchise here? And now I’m actually hired by the Lightning. I feel very privileged, very happy, and we’re super excited,” Bellemare said.
Bellemare made his NHL debut at 29 after signing with the Philadelphia Flyers as a free agent in 2014 and played until he was 39 — a trajectory he plans to use as a teaching tool for prospects who were not first-round picks. “Not every one of the kids that I’m going to talk to is a first round pick. So if you want to make it, it’s going to take an extra amount of work, but then an attitude that makes you understand that if you work it will pay off eventually. I got there when I was almost 30 and I played until I was 39, so it’s a doable thing,” Bellemare said.
He pointed to Lightning forward Brandon Hagel as a current model for young players. “You look at Hagel. He’s not the biggest guy, right? He has the talent, has all of that. But his attitude on the ice is just something different. It doesn’t matter that he’s not gonna have Nikita Kucherov’s hands or anything. He’s having a hell of a career because of that attitude that he has where he just doesn’t want to get beat.”
Bellemare called leading France at the Olympics “perfect,” adding, “I take a lot of pride to be able to wear the jersey, give back a little bit to my country and my national team for helping me become the man that I am now.” He is the nation’s all-time leader in NHL games played and ranks second in goals, assists and points.
The undrafted French trailblazer said the new role carries emotion. “The cool thing about it is that I’m going into a new line of work that, first of all, I never thought I was going to be able to do. I never thought that I could be a French person being hired by an NHL franchise. I mean, how cool is that,” he said. “I’m gonna go there with butterflies in my stomach, and I’m not sure of everything I’m gonna do. I’m gonna have to learn a bunch of new stuff, too, and that’s super exciting.”