Bellemare hired by Lightning as player development specialist

Pierre-Edouard Bellemare was hired by the Tampa Bay Lightning as a player development specialist on Thursday.

The 41-year-old, who played for France at the 2026 Winter Olympics, will join the Lightning's development staff under JP Cote, focusing on forward prospects, and will work with the staff and players of Syracuse, Tampa Bay's American Hockey League affiliate.

“I am so proud to come back to the Tampa organization,” the former forward told NHL.com. “I feel absolutely privileged and excited at the same time. Like I’ve always said, I will stop playing the game when I stop learning and now, all of a sudden, there is a brand new type of learning I’m going to do, a new type of expertise I’m going to have. And, quite frankly, as a French hockey player, just the fact that an NHL team would consider me is already, like, privileged, right?”

Bellemare played 10 NHL seasons after he debuted with the Philadelphia Flyers as an undrafted rookie in 2014-15. He played 700 games, the most by a player born and trained in France, with the Flyers, Vegas Golden Knights, Colorado Avalanche, Lightning and Seattle Kraken.

“Never in my wildest dream when I started to play the game," he said, "or even later on, when I started learning about the NHL in my 20s, would I ever thought, ‘You're going to have a long career, you’re going to play in the NHL, and after all of that, you’re going to have the opportunity to work in the NHL.'”

Born in Le Blanc-Mesnil, France, Bellemare ranks second among all French players in NHL history with 138 points (64 goals, 74 assists), behind Antoine Roussel (197 points in 607 games).

He reached the Stanley Cup Final twice, with Vegas in 2018 and Tampa Bay in 2022, and had 15 points (five goals, 10 assists) in 85 postseason games.

Bellemare announced his retirement as a player on June 18 after 37 games with HC Ajoie of the Swiss National League last season.

He did so after achieving his childhood dream of representing France as captain of its men’s team at the Olympics, where he had one goal and averaged 18:24 of ice time in four games.

“The Olympics was very surreal in a way that, as you know, when you look for something so long and then it finally happened,” he said. “When we got to the Olympics, we’re in the village, we're like, it just opened my eyes.”

Bellemare said he’s looking forward to rejoining the Lightning, where he had 33 points (13 goals, 20 assists) in 153 games from 2021-23.

“When I got to free agency with Colorado, here comes Tampa, and we’re, like, ‘Oh my God, we can live in Florida and also play for the Cup.' That's absolutely amazing, right? So we had an absolute blast with Tampa, and we went to the Cup Final again.”

Bellemare said he owes his playing career and the player development specialist job to his late mother, Frederique, the matriarch of an impoverished family with five children.

“The Lightning are not hiring me just for my skill on the ice and everything,” he said. “They're hiring me for something that I've done, because of the way that I talk, and the way that I've enjoyed every single moment at work in the NHL that made me a resilient player.

“I’ve become that way because my mom taught me that I should enjoy every moment, right? It’s not given to you, those moments, you have to cherish them. So her education kind of created this opportunity for me because all I’ve done is try to be a good person, and eventually that person was good enough for a franchise to come and say, ‘Hey, we would like you to go and teach some of our young players.”