This one wasn’t even a moral victory

If anything, it felt like the night the Islanders waved a white flag on their season, with the head coach tossing Anthony Duclair under the bus afterward by calling his play “god-awful.” Truth be told, Duclair wasn’t the only one.

The Islanders looked slow. The Islanders looked old.

The Islanders power play made a dog’s breakfast look appetizing.

The Islanders lost a lifeless game to the Lightning 4-1 on Tuesday at UBS, their second loss in three games to Tampa Bay and sixth defeat in a row.

“At the end of the day, we’re doing it to ourselves,” Bo Horvat said. “We’re just making the wrong plays and the wrong mistakes at the wrong time.

“We just make the same mistakes over and over again that are costing us. At the end of the day, at this time of year, we’re trying to make a push here. It’s not good enough.”

Last season, Game 73 was right when the Islanders started their mad dash to the playoffs, going 8-0-1 over the last nine games to clinch in Game 81.

A similar run is still possible this time given the state of the Eastern Conference.

But it sure doesn’t look likely after the Canadiens coming back in the final seconds to beat Florida on Tuesday to put the Islanders five points back with eight games left in their season.

Beyond the math taking a turn for the worse, the Islanders looked and sounded on Tuesday like a team completely out of answers, putting up a paltry nine shots in the final period of a must-win game, three of which came after Nick Paul iced the game with an empty-net goal.

“They just got pucks in and we weren’t able to sustain zone time,” Ryan Pulock said. “I felt like we created a look and we weren’t able to get back on that puck and secure that puck.”

There were chances for the Islanders to get themselves back into Tuesday’s game, namely four power plays that included a short five-on-three.

None resulted in a grade-A chance, let alone a goal.

At times, the Lightning possessed the puck at four-on-five, and accounted for better chances, than the Islanders.

For that matter, the Islanders also looked better at four-on-five than on the power play, with their lone goal coming from Horvat shorthanded and the penalty kill putting in a perfect night.

“There’s moments in the game where you need to [be] clutch and we didn’t do a good enough job on those power plays,” Roy said.

A pair of five-on-five breakdowns with the game tied at one in the second period, both off the rush, broke open the game.

Adam Pelech left Jake Guentzel open at the right post to deliver a one-timer off Nikita Kucherov’s feed at 8:09 of the second for a 2-1 Tampa Bay lead.

Just over 2:30 later, the Islanders were caught in a bad line change and coughed up a three-on-one, with Kucherov dishing it to Victor Hedman to make it 3-1.

Unlike the two games over the weekend, there was no perfunctory comeback effort here.

The Islanders negated their own power play 23 seconds into the third and did not get much better from there.

Roy, who jokingly referred to himself as “Captain Positive” Tuesday morning, kept an optimistic spin until he was asked about Duclair, at which point he made perfectly clear how he feels about the veteran’s recent play.

“He’s not skating, he’s not competing, he’s not moving his feet,” Roy said. “He’s not playing up to what we expect from him.”

“I think it’s an effort thing,” he added.

It’s been over a week now since a controversial goalie interference call negated Kyle Palmieri’s apparent game-winner against Columbus, with the Islanders eventually losing in a shootout, and the team has not looked the same since.

Whether that game hurt them mentally or this is simply a lacking roster catching up with the Islanders, who can say? That question is merely academic at this point.

What matters is that time is running out to take this season off life support.