Boston Bruins: Should Stanley Cup Champs Skip the Traditional White House Visit?

Leading up to Saturday’s confrontation with the Chicago Blackhawks at the United Center, Boston Bruins head coach Claude Julien was reminded of the last weekend of June. That was when Blackhawks skipper Joel Quenneville rushed him from the site of the NHL draft back to his hotel to take a congratulatory phone call from U.S. President Barack Obama.

In turn, the question pushed its way to the forefront: When will the Bruins visit the White House, as is customary for every major sports champion in the country?

In light of the hard-earned, redemptive 3-2 shootout victory that followed, an equally crucial question ought to be the response:

Is it a good idea for the Bruins to acknowledge their 2010-11 season yet again?

After all, they only just seem to have put last year behind them after failure to do so tripped them up in the first week of the new season.

For the sake of the here and now, it is seriously worth this team’s while to consider breaking tradition. They may, by all means, gratefully accept the president’s kudos from a distance just as Julien urgently made sure to do when he was 10 days removed from garnering the Cup in the first place.

But that would only require a few minutes, at the most. Conversely, by carving out the better part of a whole morning or afternoon in the middle of the season to be acclaimed in person, the Bruins run the risk of repeating the same mistake they made with the Patriots last week.

No two seasons of defending a crown are alike, and considering what has happened in the young phases of this campaign, the 2011-12 Bruins’ defining characteristic may be a desperate need to keep the last Cup out of their heads. There is only room in those heads for the 2012 Stanley Cup, whose destination is naturally far from settled.

They had an even three months between the clinching game in Vancouver and the first day of training camp in September to conduct as many team and individual celebrations. And bringing the trophy back to the TD Garden to partake in the much-anticipated banner-raising ceremony ought to have been the grand epilogue of that series of parties.

Unfortunately, the celebration went a tad too far. Not only was the franchise’s sixth Stanley Cup banner affixed to the Garden rafters on Oct. 6, but in the ensuing bout with Philadelphia, 20 palm-sized replicas of the banner sat on the upper-left side of their jerseys.

Semi-coincidentally, the Bruins spilled an initial 1-0 lead within the final minute of the opening period and conceded a 2-1 decision to the Flyers.

Three days later, after redressing themselves with a 4-1 triumph over Tampa Bay, the team took an outing to Gillette Stadium, much the same way they had visited Fenway Park four days after the clincher.

That afternoon of sharing the Cup with the Patriots was sandwiched by the Lightning game and a matinee game against Colorado the following day. When the offense took that day off and forced Tuukka Rask to accept a 1-0 loss, Julien was apt to say it was his team’s responsibility, not Bill Belichick’s, to get back to business in a hurry.

It was very kind of Julien to exonerate the Patriots, as he should have. But the Patriots also played a home game on Sept. 18, two days after the Bruins had convened for training camp and two days prior to their intrasquad game at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence.

For that matter, the Pats also had two preseason games on their home turf, long before the Bruins broke in their own slate of extramural engagements. They really couldn’t have scheduled their sport-to-sport get-together for an earlier date?

Regardless, after Columbus Day weekend, the Cup officially ended its extended summer in New England and the Bruins took off on their first road trip. They will come back home on Tuesday still trying to return to the .500 mark for the first time since they were 0-0-0 the moment the banner went up.

Part of the reason they are below that mark is, quite possibly, because a sizable portion of the roster has had trouble turning the page. And these 2011 championship-centered events are not helping in that regard.

After the first week of next month, the Bruins will have no more than three days off between games at a time. They will have four days between a home bout with San Jose this Saturday and their first meeting of the season with Montreal the following Thursday.

Theoretically, if they want to shake off the afterglow of another diversion and quickly refocus for their next opponent, then early next week is the most favorable time to visit the White House. But it's not a realistic arrangement at this point.

And no matter when the meeting occurs, the Bruins will still reopen the already apparent notion that they have had too much of a good thing by excessively appreciating their immediate past.

Do they really want to risk losing grip on the present again?

Heck, by respectfully foregoing the traditional White House visit, the Bruins could even set a constructive example for Obama. All they need to say is, “As great as the memory of our 2011 Stanley Cup is, we’re focusing on 2012 now, because we haven’t won anything in that year yet.”