Rangers camp opens with priorities shifted by NHL’s time crunch

For the Rangers and the 31 other NHL teams, time is not just of the essence as training camps opened across the league Wednesday.

It is unprecedentedly finite.

The Blueshirts have just 12 days to finalize an Opening Night roster that’s going to springboard the team into a turnaround season.

They have just four exhibition games — cut down from the usual six thanks to the new CBA — to experiment and figure out what combinations work best.

Shaving a 48-man roster down to 22-23 might be relatively straightforward, but evaluating a team with new faces, ramping up conditioning and establishing a routine in such limited time is not.

“I think the format, it changes things significantly,” head coach Mike Sullivan said at MSG Training Center on Wednesday. “The format of the camp is going to be completely different than what we ran last year. Last year, we had three teams. This year, we’re going to have two. When you look at starting tomorrow to Opening Night against Boston, we have 12 days. We have four exhibition games and two days off built into those 12 days. If you take away that time, we essentially have 10 practices, six when they’re not including a game that night. So time is of the essence. We thought long and hard about this, going through our coach’s meetings a month or so ago. Building this thing out and what we thought made the most sense.

“We’re going to get after the team concept right away, start to instill concepts from Day 1 starting [Thursday]. And then still try to accomplish what we always try to accomplish in training camp, and that is to get the team ready for Game 1 and provide opportunities for people to show what they can do.”

There are 13 fewer players on the Rangers training camp roster this year compared to last, with zero professional tryout agreements and zero junior-level players invited to participate.

Alberts Smits, the No. 5 pick, is the only representative from the 2026 Rangers draft class.

The consolidated group forces the coaching staff and management to “prioritize what we do every day,” Sullivan said.

“I just think the players that are here are the guys that are the closest to playing for the New York Rangers,” the veteran coach continued. “From that standpoint, and it’s a necessity just because of the time constraints, you got to cut the fat off the meat, so to speak.”

Every NHL team is facing the same time crunch, but the Rangers need to maximize the preseason as much as possible. After they missed the playoffs the past two seasons, a slow start could be detrimental for a club that aggressively retooled in the offseason and is expecting different results.

Both Sullivan and Rangers president and general manager Chris Drury felt that a lack of depth was one of the team’s biggest issues last season, and they sounded like they believe it was at least partially addressed in the offseason.

Anything short of returning to the postseason in April will be considered a colossal failure for this team.

The preparation needed to achieve that goal starts now, and there isn’t any time to waste.

“My expectation is that we’re going to compete,” Sullivan said. “I think we have more depth than we had a year ago. I’m hopeful that our team can stay a little bit healthier this year, which should help us. I think we’ve addressed some of the priorities that we felt were important to help us become more competitive.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, every team’s going to go into training camp with the goal in mind that we’re going to make the playoffs to give ourselves the opportunity and the privilege to challenge for the Stanley Cup.”