Lightning Can't Shake Their Funk

TAMPA - The Lightning reached back into their history Thursday and pulled a page out of the old days - the dark ones.

From the lopsided loss to Montreal, to the large contingent of Habs fans in the crowd to the look of a team largely outmatched in a 5-2 loss to the Canadiens, Tampa Bay appears as far removed from its Stanley Cup days perhaps as it has been for the better part of the past six years.

The Lightning lost for the sixth time in the past seven games and are on their fourth stretch this season in which they have lost at least three consecutive games. And in 10 of the past 11 games Tampa Bay has failed to score more than two goals.

The loss dropped the Lightning into a tie with Washington for the lowest point total (33) in the Eastern Conference. And with a 15-20-3 record, Tampa Bay is five games or more below the .500 mark for the first time since the end of the 2001-02 season, the first full season under Coach John Tortorella.

"It is one of the worst stretches that I can remember since I've been here, how we have played, it really is," Tortorella said. "You think you're at the bottom and maybe you're going to start working up; you see something and you see stretches of the game that, holy crap, we're going lower. We have to stay within ourselves here and we can't be begging for help. We need to take the onus of this mess ourselves and try to find a way to work out of it."

The task is not going to be easy. Not with a young and inexperienced defense that teams are taking advantage of at every opportunity. Not with a lack of scoring depth through a lineup that relies heavily on its big-name stars to produce each and every night. And not with a goaltending situation that remains unstable, even with the performance of rookie Karri Ramo in his first three career starts. Johan Holmqvist got the nod in net and was pulled after allowing three goals on 11 shots, the last coming 10 seconds into the start of the second period to give Montreal a 3-0 lead, although Holmqvist came back in the game in the third when the game got out of hand.

"The only way to get out of it is to keep your mind in the right place," right wing Marty St. Louis said. "You have to find any positives and find the mistakes and correct them. But if you just feel sorry for yourself, this isn't quite the league that is going to help you out. The more time spent feeling sorry for yourself is lost time on trying to get back on the right track."

And just when it appears that things can't fall any further, another hole in the floor develops, dropping the team to a new depth.

"This is pretty low, this is as low as we've hit for a long time here," St. Louis said. "It happens, you don't like it when it happens, but you grow from it and battle through it."

Center Brad Richards said that it's not a question of effort or caring on the players part, and in some aspects it's trying too hard or caring too much.

"Don't confuse effort with playing the right way and playing the way we are supposed to play," he said. "Sometimes there's too much effort and we're doing things like we've got no brains out there. It's not like we're going out there and not caring and quit, but when things are this bad, you look from where you're looking in the press box or you look at the video, sometimes that's the way it looks.

"It's just a disease that takes over the team when you're in that type of situation. You can't get out of your own way sometimes. There's not one thing. We could sit here for half an hour and go over things that we're doing wrong."

Tortorella also noted that there are several areas of concern, although he said he can see one common element that is running rampant through the lineup.

"We have zip for confidence, and it's not just defensemen, it's not just our third-, fourth-liners, it's right on through our top guys, too," he said. "So that's something that we're going to have to try to restore somehow, and it's not an easy thing to do when you're in a funk like this."