Rangers give up another late goal but beat Ducks in shootout

ANAHEIM, Calif. – One thing the Rangers are sure to remember from their longest road trip of the season: NHL games are not 59 minutes long.

For the second straight game, the Blueshirts allowed the tying goal in the final minute of regulation -- and for the second straight game, it didn’t cost them a victory.

The Rangers’ longest road trip of the season lasted just a little longer than scheduled Thursday night, but David Quinn and the boys won’t mind. They won their second straight game by the shootout route, beating the Anaheim Ducks, 3-2, to close out the four-game trip 2-2-0.

Rickard Rakell’s goal with 25.3 seconds left in regulation tied it at 2-2 for the Ducks and forced the five-minute, three-on-three, sudden-death overtime, which was scoreless. Mats Zuccarello and Mika Zibanejad scored in the shootout for the Rangers; Pontus Aberg missed the net and Ryan Getzlaf was stopped for the Ducks, who dropped  their seventh game in a row (0-5-2).

While the Rangers will at some point deal with the fact that they gave up a goal in the final minute of regulation in each of the last three games of the road trip, Quinn wasn’t going to focus on that after the win.

“Listen, this is not easy,’’ he said. “This long of a trip, the last game – you could sense it in practice yesterday that we didn’t have a lot of life. I’m going to focus on the way we played for 60 minutes and gutted it out. And you could just tell, a lot of guys didn’t have a lot of energy, and in an 82-game season, you have to find ways to manage to get points in games you’re not playing great and don’t feel great. And we did that tonight.’’

Said defenseman and alternate captain Marc Staal, “I mean, it’s the last game of a 10-day trip – we’ve had some ups and downs throughout it. It’s kind of one we just kind of had to gut out, and it felt good to put the type of effort in to get the win. Some ups and downs over the trip, but I liked our resolve and the way we responded in San Jose and we backed it up tonight. We’re skating a lot better. It’s good to end the road trip with a win.’’

After losing to L.A. on Sunday on a last-minute goal by Alec Martinez, the Rangers won the last two games despite the fact that they couldn’t close out a game they led in the final seconds. The Sharks’ Tomas Hertl had scored with less than two seconds left in regulation to tie Tuesday night’s game at 3 before Kevin Shattenkirk gave the Rangers a 4-3 shootout victory.

Coming off that game, an effort that Quinn thought might have been his team’s best of the season, he opted to dress the same lineup as Tuesday, meaning forward Pavel Buchnevich was scratched for the second straight game.

“I thought we had a really good hockey game the other night, and those guys deserve to be back in with their effort,’’ Quinn said before the game.

The only major change was that goaltender Alexandar Georgiev got the start rather than Henrik Lundqvist. But Quinn made one more subtle change, putting rookie Filip Chytil on the second power play. Chytil, who had no goals and two assists through the first 12 games, had been benched for most of the third period against the Sharks, and Quinn said he had addressed the reasons why with the 19-year-old.

“There are things that we’ve got to continue to work on with him and there are some things you let a player play through, and then there are things you don’t, because it sends the wrong message,’’ Quinn said.

Clearly, though, Quinn didn’t hold a grudge because he put Chytil out on the power play and he started the play that led to the game’s first goal, passing from behind the net to fellow rookie Brett Howden in the low slot. The puck went off Howden’s stick to an unmarked Kevin Hayes, who fired it in for his third goal of the season at 1:42 of the second period.

Jakob Silfverberg tied it for the Ducks with a power-play goal of his own, batting a rebound out of the air after Georgiev made a great save of a right circle shot by Rakell at 12:31. Howden put the Rangers up 2-1 when he finished a tic-tac-toe play that went from Staal at the left point to Jimmy Vesey in the lower left circle to Howden, uncovered in the slot.

By Colin Stephenson

colin.stephenson@newsday.comColinSNewsday

Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.