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TAMPA, Fla. -- Michel Therrien didn't have to do a frame-by-frame analysis of the game tape to evaluate the Penguins' performance last night.

All he had to do was watch it for 60 minutes.

And whatever Therrien didn't see, he probably smelled.

Therrien, the Penguins' coach, called his team's 5-1 loss to Tampa Bay at the St. Pete Times Forum their "worst game of the year," and that might have been understating it.

The Penguins were outshot, outskated and outworked from the earliest moments of play. While the Lightning looked desperate, the Penguins seemed almost disinterested.

"We were not prepared to play," Therrien said. "It's disappointing. Very disappointing."

Fact is, if there was anything misleading about the final score, it's that the Penguins weren't nearly as competitive as Tampa Bay's four-goal margin of victory might suggest.

"The score could have been a lot worse than it was," Penguins defenseman Brooks Orpik said. "The goalies actually made some pretty big saves."

Therrien started Jocelyn Thibault for the second consecutive game, but replaced him with Marc-Andre Fleury after the Lightning scored on three of its first 15 shots.

Playing both goalies made perfect sense, given the way the game was playing out, although perhaps Therrien should have tried to come up with a way to use them at the same time.

The victory was Tampa Bay's 12th in a row against the Penguins, who finished their three-game road trip 1-2 and have slipped nine points behind first-place New Jersey in the Atlantic Division.

Despite the Lightning's domination of head-to-head play, however, Tampa Bay needed the victory to match the Penguins' total of 75 points.

"They're a much better team than they showed tonight," Lightning forward Vaclav Prospal said. "It was a really good game for us, but maybe they didn't come out with their best."

Yeah, maybe.

The Penguins (33-19-9) have two games in hand on the Devils, who will visit Mellon Arena at 7:38 tomorrow, but are closer to falling out of the Eastern playoff field than they are to being atop their division.

"A couple of bad games, and you're right out of the playoff picture," Orpik said.

Tampa Bay, though playing its third game in four nights, was coming off a 6-2 spanking at home by Boston, so no one was surprised that the Lightning opened the game with a palpable urgency.

"We all knew we'd better come up with a good effort and get a good start," center Brad Richards said. "We hadn't done that for a while."

Perhaps, but Tampa Bay clearly hadn't forgotten how to do it.

Martin St. Louis rapped a Dan Boyle rebound past Thibault during a power play at 2:17 of the opening period, and Paul Ranger flipped in a backhander from the slot at 3:56 for what proved to be the winner.

Therrien said he realized "really, really early" that his team was hopelessly flat and, while his assessment was based on his observations from behind the bench, he could have come to the same conclusion simply by looking at the scoreboard.

Thibault turned aside the rest of Tampa Bay's 14 first-period shots, but the tone had been set.

"We definitely let [Thibault] down, the way he's been playing," Orpik said. "He was just starting to get his confidence at a pretty good level."

Filip Kuba beat Thibault on the short side at 4:58 of the second, at which point Therrien made his goalie switch, although he insisted it wasn't because of Thibault's work.

"As a coach, you have to try to change the momentum," Therrien said. "You have to try to do anything, but nothing was working."

Sergei Gonchar got the Penguins' only goal when he beat Johan Holmqvist with a slap shot from the left side of the slot during a five-on-three power play at 8:26 of the second, but Richards countered for Tampa Bay by beating Fleury from the right side at 1:31 of the third.

Vincent Lecavalier then rubbed it in with a short-handed goal at 14:16 to close out the scoring and give the Penguins plenty to ponder as they prepare to face New Jersey tomorrow.

"We're a team that's supposed to care," Therrien said. "It's going to be a great opportunity for us to see who wants to bounce back from a performance like this."