Lightning's scoring has been two-sided

When it comes to goal production this season, the Lightning are so top-heavy at this point that the team would have a tough time bailing out the water in the hull of a ship.

Of the 44 goals the Lightning scored in 17 games heading into Monday's late game against Phoenix, 25 came from center Steven Stamkos and left wing Ryan Malone. The rest of the team - which includes top scorers Vinny Lecavalier, Marty St. Louis and Alex Tanguay - had accounted for 19 goals. That's an astounding 56.8 percent of Tampa Bay's goal production coming from two players.

And no other team comes close to that kind of one-sided goal production. While San Jose's Dany Heatley and Patrick Marleau lead the league as a duo with 26 combined goals, those two account for 36.6 of the Sharks' goals. In Anaheim, Corey Perry and Teemu Selanne have combined for 22 of the Ducks' 51 goals, or 43.1 percent of team's goal production, 15 percentage points lower than Stamkos and Malone.

"Because we are winning, it is a major concern because we are going to need goals," Lightning coach Rick Tocchet said. "We can not continue with just two guys supplying all the offense for us."

While it's a luxury to have Stamkos tied for fourth in the league in scoring and Malone right behind him tied for eighth, no other player on Tampa Bay has scored more than three goals, with only St. Louis and Tanguay having reached that mark.

But St. Louis hasn't scored a goal since Oct. 12 against Florida, a span of 12 games. Tanguay scored two of his three goals in back-to-back games while Lecavalier, who didn't score in the final seven games of last season, has just two this year and went the first eight games without a goal. He entered Monday's game on a four-game goalless drought.

And while it's easy to say that each of those players might just be enduring a scoring slump, after 17 games when does a slump turn into an alarming trend?

"To me, scoring slumps are going to happen to anybody, I just would like to see us develop an attitude to want to score," Tocchet said. "I keep preaching around the net, things like that, instead of trying to score the flashy goals. To me, that's an attitude, that's digging in and we are not at the level I want us at as a hockey club should be at with an attitude to score.

"If you go to the net and the goaltender robs you 10 games in a row, at least you are getting those chances. We're not getting those consistent chances around the net because we have to get better, we are two levels away from getting to being a team that really wants to score in front of the net and that's something we preach every day."

It's not just the big names the Lightning need production from, either. They need more balance from the lower lines, as well.

"We would like everyone to be chipping in here and there and maybe that one-goal game would mean a little bit more," said center Jeff Halpern, who has one goal. "But we've got three guys in Vinny, Marty and Tangs (Tanguay) who I don't think anybody is too worried about their production because it will come. From there, I think guys like myself and others need to step up and contribute."