My rating of the Tampa Bay Lightning top 10 prospects is complete, and the link can be found below. The top prospect in this pool by a wide margin is forward Sam O’Reilly, who will begin his professional career this season following MVP awards for the OHL regular season (Red Tilson Trophy), the OHL playoffs (the 99 Wayne Gretzky Award), and the CHL Memorial Cup Championship (Stafford Smythe Memorial Trophy). Although projected to begin his season in Syracuse of the AHL, O’Reilly is slated to arrive in Tampa at some point during the 2026-27 campaign.
In addition to O’Reilly’s presence among the Lightning’s prospects, General Manager Julien BriseBois made an excellent trade early this summer with Chicago to land forward Jack Pridham (92nd overall in 2024 to CHI) in exchange for a 2027 3rd round pick. Pridham, an O’Reilly teammate for the 2026 Memorial Cup champion Kitchener Rangers, was the tournament’s leading scorer (9 points on 5 goals and 4 assists), in providing a lethal 1-2 punch with O’Reilly en route to the title. Pridham will continue his development at the University of Denver this season, and will likely be considered a top prospect next season should he continue his productivity with the Pioneers.
As can be expected with an organization having a sustained period of excellence at the NHL level, Tampa’s prospect pool has been thinned quite a bit throughout the years. However, its prospect pool is by no means completely barren. First, in addition to O’Reilly, help appears to be on the way this coming season, primarily in forward Dylan Duke, who was the AHL’s third-leading goal-scorer (32 goals) in 2025-26. Second, BriseBois continued his rebuild of the prospect pool this summer in adding right-shot d-men Oleg Kulebyakin (52nd overall) and Tomas Kralovic (90th overall) through the draft, both proven scorers in the QMJHL (Kulebyakin) and Slovakia’s top pro league (Kralovic). In fact, Kralovic will begin his North American professional career this season in Syracuse, as an 18-year-old.
https://thehockeylawyer.net/team-stats/tampa-bay-lightning