Jeff Carter has scored one goal in the past 17 games.
The Penguins are 9-5-4 in those, anyway.
Even Rodrigues has gotten one in the past 25.
His team's record in them? 14-7-4.
And Danton Heinen has one in the past 11.
Which hasn't stopped the Penguins from going 6-4-1.
It seems the only thing more obvious than their lack of complementary scoring during the past quarter of the season is how it hasn't prevented them from accumulating points.
Despite relying on the Jake Guentzel-Sidney Crosby-Bryan Rust and second-line center Evgeni Malkin to carry their offense for many weeks, the Penguins are tied for second place in the Metropolitan Division, just six points out of first.
That actually could be encouraging for them, if the Penguins were confident they could continue to win on a fairly regular basis while getting so little, scoring from so many forwards.
Which they aren't.
And with good reason.
"Our record hasn't suffered because of a lack of secondary scoring ... but it's going to," president of hockey operations Brian Burke said Wednesday. "Certainly, if you get into a playoff situation where a team has the last (personnel) change, you need secondary scoring. You need some balance."
The Penguins, of course, could try to address that need via a trade before the March 21 deadline, and perhaps they will.
Trouble is, Burke projects that they will have "around 17 cents" worth of salary-cap space as the deadline approaches.
He was kidding, in the interest of making a point, and estimated that they actually figure to have about $170,000 cap space with which to work.
That's still far less than would be needed to handle a consequential move, although Burke suggested that it might be adequate to cover a team meal at a fast-food restaurant.
And while Burke reiterated that the Penguins seem unlikely to do anything substantial before the deadline -- "Given our cap situation, I'm not sure what, if anything, we're prepared to do" -- he said there have been discussions with other clubs.
"(Ron Hextall) has been working the phones, and listening a lot," Burke said. "We don't feel like we're close on anything, but that can change."
For now, though, the plan is to generate some offensive diversity from players already on the payroll, whether here or in Wilkes-Barre, although the latter does not appear to be a front-burner option at the moment.
"We've got (Valtteri) Puustinen, we've got (Radim) Zohorna, we've got Drew O'Connor (in Wilkes-Barre)," Burke said. "We've got guys we could call up to give us a boost and score."
He was quick to add, however, that "we've got some cap constraints, which are severe."
That means the search for secondary scoring likely will focus on the major-league roster, and Burke contends that it can be successful.
"We're kind of looking for the solution internally," he said. "We have been a team that has had depth and balance from the start (of the season), and we can get back to that."
And if that doesn't work -- if guys like Carter, Heinen, Rodrigues and Brock McGinn can't regain some semblance of the goal-scoring touch they showed earlier in 2021-22 -- it's always possible that Hextall and Burke will feel an added urgency to do something before the trade deadline, to make a move that might not even have been considered just a few weeks earlier.
"The issue with the trade deadline is, you can go from having nothing available to you -- zero, nothing alive at all, not one ball in the air -- to making three deals," Burke said. "In 10 minutes, that whole thing can change.
"A day is an eon in our world. The fact that we're getting closer to the deadline ... there's still plenty of time."
