Lots to cover at the morning skate at Madison Square Garden here today, most prominently, of course, the relative health statuses of the two resident living legends.

► FOLLOW ALONG

• Heading back to the hotel. I'll whip up a story once there.

• Sid's not available to reporters this morning. I spent some time in the room just now with Vincent Desharnais (our first good talk), Michael Bunting (always a great talk), and Emil Bemstrom (been a long time since we talked).

This was Bemstrom:

• Here’s Sid out here right now: 

• Alex Nedeljković in goal for Pittsburgh, per Sullivan.

• I asked Sullivan how his teams have tended to handle the absences of Sid and/or Evgeni Malkin, who’ll also obviously not play tonight: "Obviously when you have players of that stature out of the lineup, those guys are hard to replace. I'm stating the obvious when I say that, but I think the guys that are in the lineup recognize what type of effort and what type of purpose we need to have tonight in order to have success. We're not going to replace those guys. It's impossible. But what we can do is we can put a game on the ice that is going to give us a chance to win. We've got to have a very high compete level, we've got to have a lot of structure to our game, we've got to play with a lot of purpose, and it takes collective effort. When we play together as five-man units, I think we have capable guys and we have what it takes." 

• Sidney Crosby’s on the ice right now, but he WON’T play tonight, Sullivan just said, adding that it's "encouraging" that Crosby was participating in the skate and not ruling out that he could return for the game tomorrow night in Philadelphia.

• Igor Shesterkin in goal for New York.

• It’s the dads trip, and they’re actually going onto the ice:

DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS

• Mike Sullivan speaks at 11 a.m., so in just a few minutes. Optional skate begins at roughly the same time. 

• Hey, everyone! Clear skies above Manhattan:

DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS