When Tyler Kennedy opened the scoring Thursday night in the Penguins' 3-0 victory at Boston with his 10th goal, he became the 12th player on the team to reach double figures in goals.

Going into the games Friday night, no other team had as many players with double-digit goals. Washington was second with 11, Chicago third with 10. The Penguins' opponent today, Carolina, has six, and Tampa Bay rides the caboose with five players who have at least 10.

"I feel like anybody on our team can score. That's a tribute to our depth," said Penguins winger Ruslan Fedotenko, who picked up his 10th goal a night before Kennedy.

Since the end of the Olympics break, the Penguins have been getting a steady stream of goals from their wingers. Sixteen of the club's 27 goals in the past nine games have come from the eight players who would be considered full-time wingers among the regular forwards.

It likely is no coincidence the Penguins are 6-2-1 in that stretch.

---

Scouting report

• Matchup: Penguins vs. Carolina Hurricanes, 1:08 p.m. today, Mellon Arena.
• TV/Radio: FSN Pittsburgh, WXDX-FM (105.9).
• Probable goaltenders: Marc-Andre Fleury for Penguins. Manny Legace for Hurricanes.
• Penguins: Coming off 2-2-1 road trip. ... Chris Kunitz needs one goal for 100 in his career. ... Sidney Crosby has 68 giveaways, sixth most in NHL before Friday night.
• Hurricanes: Are 15-6-1 in past 22 games. ... Are 3-9-2 in first of back-to-back games. ... Are 24-8-5 when Ray Whitney has a point.
• Hidden stat: Penguins are 7-19-2 when trailing after two periods; Hurricanes are 2-22-4.

---

In those nine games, Pascal Dupuis has four goals, Chris Kunitz three, Mike Rupp, Alexei Ponikarovsky (in seven games) and Fedotenko two, and Matt Cooke, Kennedy (in seven games) and Bill Guerin (in six games) one.

Each of those players, or four lines' worth, has at least 10 goals.

That has taken some pressure off of the Penguins' top three centers, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal, although, as Dupuis pointed out about Crosby: "The guy's got 45 goals right now. I think he likes the pressure to score goals."

Crosby led the NHL in goal-scoring before Friday night. Malkin has 23 goals, Staal 19. They would rank 1-2-3 on the team if not for Ponikarovsky, who scored 19 of his 21 goals with Toronto before being acquired in a March 2 trade.

During the Penguins' 6-2-1 stretch, Crosby has three of the team's 27 goals. Malkin, who has missed the past two games because of a foot injury, has two.

With the help of the wingers, they have not had to carry the team in terms of filling the net.

For weeks before the Olympics, Crosby and Malkin accounted for a huge chunk of the Penguins' goals. In the 12 games leading into the break, those two scored 19 of the team's 37 goals.

Not that there's anything wrong with having a couple of prolific scorers -- the Penguins were 6-3-3 in those 12 games.

But the other forwards are glad to pitch in, especially down the stretch of the regular season.

"With the intensity this late in the season, I think everyone knows that everyone's got to contribute," Kennedy said. "That was a big part of why we won [the Stanley Cup] last year -- everyone helped out."

The Penguins had 11 players with at least 10 goals in the 2008-09 regular season, led by the same three centers but in the order of Malkin-Crosby-Staal, plus six wingers, center Max Talbot and defenseman Kris Letang.

This season, defenseman Sergei Gonchar, who also got his 10th goal in the past week, joins the three centers and eight wingers to make up the double-digit dozen.

Although Crosby is chasing the Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy as the top goal-getter in the NHL and his second Art Ross Trophy as the top point-getter, he welcomes the wingers' help.

"It's really important, especially this time of year and moving forward," Crosby said. "We're going to need everybody. With each win, it's going to be a different guy that scores the big one."

Dupuis, playing on one of the top two lines in recent weeks, does not see any particular pattern or change that has sparked the wingers beyond a sense of responsibility and urgency.

"I think they're just going in for everybody right now," he said. "I think everybody has stepped up their game. It's great to play as a team and have everybody helping to win."

Cooke can't dispute that.

"I think that that stuff kind of comes in spurts," he said. "You want to get distributed scoring throughout your lineup.

"It just seems like sometimes it's the [defensemen] getting all the goals, and, sometimes, it's Sid getting all the goals, and sometimes it's the rest of us.

"We all want to chip in. We all want to help out. But, when it's throughout the lineup, I think it makes the game more fun for everybody and easier for everybody."

Penguins Plus, a blog by Dave Molinari and Shelly Anderson, is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.