NEW YORK -- The Penguins have a scheduled day off, which is something of a rarity on the road.
They've settled in at a hotel in lower Manhattan and are, for the most part, free to rest and relax however they choose.
They can take advantage of the sunny, seasonably cool conditions to roam the narrow streets in that part of town or enjoy a casual meal with teammates. Maybe wander down to Battery Park for a look at the Statue of Liberty, or visit the World Trade Center site and museum.
The players do, anyway.
Mike Sullivan and his staff likely don't have the luxury of all that free time. They have to get their team ready to play the New York Islanders, winners of 10 games in a row, Thursday at 7:08 p.m. at Barclays Center.
That means looking for flaws in the stingiest team defense in the league, a group allowing just 2.14 goals per game. Trying to figure out how a power play that is 0-for-20 in its past nine games can generate a goal against a penalty-killing unit that has snuffed 85.4 percent of its opponents' chances. Perhaps they'll even attempt to recognize Islanders center Derick Brassard, who has five goals in 14 games and isn't looking anything like the non-factor he was during a stint with the Penguins.
The coaches, then, figure to spend a significant chunk of the day staring at video screens, picking out individual and team trends that can be folded into the game plan that will be presented to the players when they convene Thursday morning, whether it's for a full game-day skate or just a meeting.
"We divide-and-conquer," Sullivan said. "We have different guys who are watching different things. Part of their responsibilities are on the game-planning side. For example, Jacques Martin runs our penalty-kill, so he watches and pre-scouts and game-plans for our opponents' power play. (Mark Recchi) and Sergei (Gonchar) run our power play, with my help, but they spend a fair amount of time game-planning on our opponents' penalty-kills.
"(Video coach Andy Saucier), the last couple of years, has done a terrific job, and that was an expanded role that I gave (Saucier) when our coaching staff evolved, when (Rick Tocchet) went to Phoenix and then (Recchi) came in. I had (Saucier) prepare the 5-0n-5 pre-scout of our opponent, so he usually watches the three most recent games of our opponent and he'll pull tendencies and things of that sort.
"I oversee it all and have my hand in all of it, as most head coaches do, but we tend to divvy up the duties because there are only so many hours in the day. I spend a lot of my time on watching our games and watching our team and trying to help our team continue to improve and get better in certain areas. I spend a lot of time breaking our film down and watching our team. Not that I don't watch opponents -- I do -- but all of these other guys are watching them more in-depth than I am, so that we can prepare the team appropriately."
Bryan Rust noted that some of the information the coaches compile will be presented to the players in written form -- "We get sheets with their lineup, guys' strengths and weaknesses, and goalie stuff and things like that posted in the locker room," he said -- but most of it is passed along visually.
"There's a lot of video," Jack Johnson said. "What you're trying to do is pick up tendencies, so you have somewhat of an idea in certain situations what they're trying to do or who they're trying to look for."
Chances are that the coaches will pick up a lot more insights from the video they study than they will pass along, if only because players can only be expected to absorb so much before the useful details of what opponents do morphs into intellectual clutter.
"I've always believed, to a certain extent, that we don't want to paralyze our players with too much information," Sullivan said. "Information overload. We're trying to cut the fat off the meat, so to speak. We're trying to give them a few things, a few tendencies going into a game that we think are important to bring to their attention.
"But we're more concerned about our own game, and how we're playing. I think game-planning for opponents is of more value, or becomes more of a priority, in the playoffs, when you're playing a team in a seven-game series, than game-to-game, where you see them once this week, then you have another team coming in two days later.
"For a lot of the regular season, especially the beginning part of the regular season, we spend a lot of time on our own team concept, trying to get better at what we're trying to do out there so that we can dictate the terms of how the game is going to be played."
While hockey teams do game-plan for opponents, it isn't the same exercise in which their football colleagues become immersed between games. Football teams not only do virtual frame-by-frame analyses of game tapes, but sometimes script the first, say, 15 or 20 offensive plays that they want to run in the next game.
It doesn't work that way in hockey. Sullivan and his assistants might go into a game with an idea of how they'd like to deploy personnel after the opening faceoff, but they can't script the first five or six shifts. Rather, they rely on the players who are on the ice at a given moment to read situations correctly and react appropriately.
"We can't go back to the huddle and say, 'OK, ready. Break,'" Sullivan said. "To a certain extent, this is a players' game. It's an instinctive game. Although we can prepare our guys for what they may see, there's always an element of unpredictability in our sport. It's just the nature of how the game's played.
"So it's more important, I think, for us to condition our guys, or train our guys, to be problem-solvers; that they have to act on their instincts and trust their instincts. We're trying to implement certain strategies and concepts that allow us to be predictable for one another, but within that, there's latitude for hockey decisions. That's where a player's instinct comes into play."
And those instincts will be as important Saturday, when Chicago visits PPG Paints Arena, as they will when the Penguins are in Brooklyn Thursday night. The NHL's unforgiving schedule is why the coaches limit how much information they pass along, at least until they're facing the same opponent in a best-of-seven playoff setting.
"You're playing so much that it's hard to plan ahead," Johnson said. "We don't have a week to prepare. Sometimes, you have one day, so you go over some things ... and then you're on to playing the next team."