CALGARY, Alberta — No matter how Saturday night’s game at Scotiabank Saddledome turned out for the New York Rangers, they will be flying home on Sunday after a highly successful road trip.
A perfect road trip would have been sweet, but it wasn’t to be. Mikael Backlund’s tip-in on a power play in overtime gave the Calgary Flames a 3-2 victory that ended their winning streak at seven games. They did extend their point streak to 8-0-2 after finishing the trip 3-0-1 and will face the Winnipeg Jets on Monday night at Madison Square Garden.
The Rangers lately have been masters at the comeback, and the Flames have been blowing leads on a nearly nightly basis. And the teams played to form after Calgary took a 2-0 lead 46 seconds into the game on a pair of goals eight seconds apart.
The Rangers fought back to tie it on a power-play goal by Alexis Lafreniere at 12:48 of the third period, but 50 seconds into overtime, Adam Fox got called for a high-sticking penalty, and the Flames converted.
The overtime loss snapped goaltender Jaroslav Halak’s personal seven-game winning streak. Halak made 29 saves, many of them great, to keep the Rangers (33-14-9) in the game.
Rangers coach Gerard Gallant stayed with the same lineup for the entire trip, though he did make one not-so-subtle tweak in how he deployed the players, elevating newcomer Vladimir Tarasenko from the second power-play unit to the first group and dropping Filip Chytil down to the second unit.
Tarasenko, who’d scored on his second shift in his Rangers debut, hadn’t done much since, so apparently Gallant thought it was time to try and get him going. Aside from putting him on the top power play, when the coach decided to shake his lines up in the second period, he put Tarasenko on the second line as his pal Artemi Panarin, flanking center Vincent Trocheck. Kaapo Kakko took Tarasenko’s spot on the top line, with Chris Kreider and Mika Zibanejad, and Barclay Goodrow moved into Kakko’s spot on the right of the Kid Line, with Alexis Lafreniere and Chytil.
The shakeup produced near immediate results, as Tarasenko scored his second goal as a Ranger at 16:53 of the period, pulling the Blueshirts within 2-1.
The coach was asked before the game whether he expected any fireworks, given that there were three fights — two by Jacob Trouba — and some thunderous hits in the Feb. 6 game the teams played in Madison Square Garden.
“You don't know what's going to happen in this game,’’ he said. “It was 10 days ago and it was a physical game. It was a wild, wide-open game, 5-4, good goals at both ends, exciting game… But that's not the game plan, to go out there and have three or four fights, if you're asking me that.’’
What did happen at the start of the game was that Calgary scored twice in the first minute of the game. First, Andrew Mangiapane won a one-on-one battle against K’Andre Miller, avoiding Miller’s attempted wraparound check and beating Halak with a backhand shot 38 seconds in. Then, off the ensuing faceoff, Adam Fox gave the puck away in the neutral zone and Nazem Kadri ended up cranking a one-timer past Halak to put the Flames up, 2-0 at :46.
But Halak stopped Mangiapane on a clean breakaway after he’d stripped Miller of the puck at the Calgary blue line, and after that, the Rangers settled down. After being outshot 11-3 early in the period, they managed to generate some chances and the shots were 13-8 — not including the crossbar that Tarasenko hit and the goalpost that Fox hit — at the end of the period.
