UNIONDALE, N.Y. -- The Detroit Red Wings had no legs Tuesday, only hands of stone.

They were outskated and outplayed badly by the New York Islanders. And they made matters worse with a slew of turnovers.

It resulted in what surely was the Red Wings’ worst performance of the season, a 6-0 loss at the Nassau Memorial Coliseum.

The road-weary Red Wings, coming off an impressive 3-1 West Coast trip and playing their fifth consecutive game away from home, mustered a season-low 16 shots on goal and, by coach Mike Babcock’s estimation, a season-low four quality scoring chances.

“I’m just thankful it wasn’t at home,” Babcock said. “Normally we come back from the West, get home at 7 in the morning, and two days later you play at home and you look like that. Thank God that was on the road and hopefully not too many people were watching television.”

Dwayne Roloson recorded his 24th career shutout, his first this season. It is the seventh time the Red Wings have been shut out, all in the past 23 games. The last time they were blanked this many times was 1976-77, when they were shut out a franchise-record 11 times en route to a 41-point season.

“We knew it was going to be a battle coming all the way back across the country, but mentally we weren’t quite ready and it showed from the start,” defenseman Brad Stuart said. “We turned the puck over too much, we spent too much time in our zone. We weren’t quick enough. All over the ice we seemed to be a step behind. Pretty ugly. We should all be pretty disappointed in ourselves.”

In dominating from start to finish, the upstart Islanders got a pair of goals in each period and improved to 7-2-1 in their past 10.

Detroit goaltender Jimmy Howard was victimized by a mistake-prone defense and a lethargic offense. Trailing 3-0, Babcock did not want to subject Howard to any more of that sloppiness, so he pulled him at 9:18 of the second period in favor of Chris Osgood, who made his first appearance since Dec. 20.

“I just thought Howie’s been playing real good for us and obviously things weren’t going well,” Babcock said. “Ozzie hasn’t played much and we’re going to need Ozzie. We got back-to-backs coming up (Saturday and Sunday). I thought it was important to get him in a game.”

Babcock said Howard will start Thursday at home against Carolina.

Looking for a spark with his team trailing 2-0 early in the second period, Babcock replaced Henrik Zetterberg with Valtteri Filppula on the top line, with Pavel Datsyuk and Todd Bertuzzi.

“I tried lots of different things. None of them worked,” Babcock said. “I’m not trying to take anything away from their team, but we just didn’t have any life.”

The Islanders took a 3-0 lead on Rob Schremp’s second goal of the game at 8:07 of the second period. Stuart fanned on a pass and coughed up the puck in front of his own net, enabling Schremp to break in alone on Howard and beat him with a deke.

“We didn’t give our goalies any help whatsoever, making mistakes,” Red Wings forward Kris Draper said. “There’s no excuse for it. You come from the West Coast, you got only that one day (of practice) in between, you really got to play smart. We didn’t do that.

“We were awful in the neutral zone. They just kept coming back at us. We just bailed on (their goalies). It was a tough night for Howie and Ozzie; we have to take responsibility for that.”

Mark Streit’s power-play goal at 16:19 of second period made it 4-0. Kyle Okposo and Bruno Gervais added to the rout by scoring goals in the third period.

The fast-skating Islanders opened the scoring on Matt Moulson’s goal at 1:11 of the first period and led 2-0 on Schremp’s first goal at 15:43 of the first.

The travel, the compressed schedule and their deteriorated depth caused by injuries has taken its toll, but the Red Wings were not making any excuses for this painful performance.

“We’ve been here before, many trips to the West Coast and coming back and playing a game, so we should be able to put up a better effort than we did today,” Zetterberg said. “There’s no excuses, we weren’t good enough.”