WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden joked that Steven Stamkos was aging after 14 seasons in the NHL, praised the Tampa Bay Lightning’s vaccination efforts and otherwise avoided politics while honoring the team for winning the Stanley Cup in each of the past two seasons.
In a rare sports break amid his administration’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the president on Monday referenced first lady Jill Biden’s attendance at a vaccination event at Lightning’s home arena last year and congratulated Lightning on winning two pandemic championships : one in an empty building in a quarantine bubble and another in a crowded home in Tampa, Florida.
“I’m not saying that the First Lady who was in your arena during the playoffs is the reason you won,” Biden said with a smile. “But I’m just saying that she was also there during election season. She seems to show up when people are winning. Just something to think about.”
Biden made few mentions of players other than Stamkos when discussing the lighting’s back-to-back title runs, which have relied heavily on Russia goalkeeper Andrei Vasilevskiy, forward Nikita Kucherov and defender Mikhail Sergachev. Vasilevskiy was last year’s playoff MVP, and Kucherov was the top scorer in each postseason.
All three players attended the event, and Sergachev shared photos of them at the White House on social media. There were no noticeable absences, and a handful of players from the 2020 Lightning championship team who had departed or retired even made appearances.
To mark the occasion, the team traveled to the nation’s capital for the third time in eight months after visiting the Washington Capitals twice this season. The Lightning flew out Sunday night after their game with the Florida Panthers and were scheduled to return home before taking on the Columbus Blue Jackets in one of their final games of the regular season on Tuesday before the playoffs begin next week.
“Pretty much everyone was on board and everyone who could make it – former players and stuff – they all tried to make it here,” said reserve captain Ryan McDonagh. “It’s just a great tradition that we have: you become part of a championship team, you get to go to the White House and meet the President.”
Though Lightning won the Stanley Cup three times — in 2004, 2020, and 2021 — it marked the organization’s first time visiting a sitting president at the White House. The 2004-05 NHL lockout prevented that year’s team from leaving, and the pandemic delayed that opportunity until nine months after the second of those back-to-back championships.
“It took a long time,” Stamkos said. “We weren’t sure if we would get this opportunity, but it was definitely worth the wait.”
Stamkos, who is Canadian, referenced McDonagh, who is from Minnesota, to speak on behalf of the team at the ceremony. Player and coach Jon Cooper, who both wore cup rings, were most impressed when Biden invited them to the Oval Office for a chat afterwards.
“In the position he’s in [being] the leader of the free world and all that stuff, he has an amazing ability to brush aside that persona and just be human, like he’s one of our teammates,” said Cooper, who is dual citizen of the US and Canada. “I wanted to get kind of greedy and sit on a bar stool with this guy with a beer and listen to the story of his life. You can see why he got elected president.”
Biden gained a few more points as he praised the Tampa area for the Major League Baseball Rays, who reached the World Series in 2020, and the NFL’s Buccaneers, who won the Super Bowl months later. He said the Lightning “might be here next year — who knows?”
The Lightning are once again among the top teams in the NHL, aiming to be the first to win the trophy three years in a row since the New York Islanders dynasty in the early 1980s.
“The good thing about our group is that the hunger is still there,” McDonagh said. “We don’t need extra motivation, but it certainly increases the anticipation for the final week of the regular season and before the playoffs begin.”