Mike Sullivan and the Penguins are ready for a condensed camp challenge

Mike Sullivan’s media availability on Tuesday was very appropriate for 2020.

That’s to say, it was interrupted unexpectedly.

Fairly early on, while answering a question about his players, Sullivan’s voice crackled away and for a handful of seconds, nothing.

He returned and explained his absence.

“My computer ran out of batteries,” the Penguins coach explained during a video conference. “I was on a lengthy (video conference) meeting with our coaching staff yesterday and I forgot to charge my laptop.”

As the calendar turns to 2021, Sullivan appears to be far better prepared to guide his retooled team than he is at making sure his PC is plugged in.

With training camp scheduled to begin Sunday, Sullivan will help craft a roster of no more than 23 players as well as a taxi squad of four to six players.

“The positive thing about our team is that we have a lot of familiarity with the guys that are challenging for the NHL roster,” Sullivan said. “I’m looking forward to watching some of the younger guys and the progress that they’ve made. Having said that, I think we’ve got a fairly good handle at where everybody is at. We’ll try to create a competitive camp and allow guys opportunity to perform. But we’re no different than any other team. We have the same challenge.”

The Penguins will only have 10 days to do that as the regular season opens Jan. 13. Sullivan estimates his team will have seven practices over that span. And with no preseason games, the Penguins plan on scrimmaging heavily.

“Five-on-five play is going to be a priority as far as what we’re going to do through the course of this training camp,” Sullivan said. “We have seven practices before the start of the season. … So we’re going to prioritize intrasquad scrimmages. We have a game-simulation day built in where we’re going to play at 7 (p.m.) so that these guys can reacclimate themselves into a gameday routine.

“We think we’ve put a pretty good plan together on how to establish the foundation of our team concept and how we’re going to play, but also allow the opportunity for these guys to get into five-on-five scrimmage play so they can get acclimated with a game environment again.”

The brevity of this camp won’t allow the Penguins to fully integrate new players to the organization’s methods.

“We’re probably not going to get to every aspect of our team concept throughout this training camp because of how short it is,” Sullivan said. “But we’re going to prioritize what we do. The last thing we want to do is give these guys too much information and overwhelm them. My experience is they turn into robots instead of allowing for their instinctive play. We’re going to try to introduce information at the appropriate times. Give them an opportunity to grasp how we’re trying to play, but we don’t want to overload them with too much information. It can be counterproductive.”

Things won’t be ideal for the Penguins as they assemble for training camp. But that’s life in 2020.

“There’s a global pandemic, and it’s interfered with everybody’s ability to play hockey and do their jobs,” Sullivan said. “We’re no different than a lot of businesses at this particular point. This has been a difficult time for the world. And in our small world, our hockey world, it’s been no different. We love to play hockey. We love to be around the rink and get on the ice and compete.”