Rangers dump Ducks for second consecutive shootout victory

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Yes, for the second straight game the Rangers surrendered a game-tying goal in the final minute of regulation with the net empty at the other end and their opponent skating with the extra attacker.

But regrets are few, for two nights after responding with a shootout win at San Jose, the Blueshirts did it again Thursday, prevailing 3-2 over the Ducks when both Mats Zuccarello and Mika Zibanejad scored in the skills competition while Alexandar Georgiev shut the door to give David Quinn’s Rangers their first two-game winning streak.

“Everyone out there has their opinion of us, negative and positive, but within this group it’s only positive,” Kevin Hayes, who scored the club’s first goal, told The Post. “I think the trip was really good for us, not just winning these two, but the way we played after kind of bottoming out with that first game in Chicago. That [4-1 defeat] was kind of a slap across the face.

“I don’t know if it had anything to do with the Red Sox winning, but the boys were ready to play in Cali. But if we’re going to be a winning team like we’re capable of being, we’ve got to do it for 60 minutes every night, not 59.”

Sunday in Los Angeles, the Blueshirts yielded the winning goal at 19:05. Tuesday, they allowed the tying goal at 19:58. In this one, it was Rickard Rakell with a screaming one-timer from the left circle on Ryan Getzlaf’s cross-ice feed at 19:34 that denied the Blueshirts a regulation victory.

“I’m going to [focus] on the resiliency,” said Quinn, whose team returns home a relevant 5-7-1, and 3-3-1 in the past seven. “We found a way and gutted it out. You have to manage to be able to get points when you don’t feel great and that’s what we did. You could tell at practice [Wednesday] that guys were tired at the end of a long trip.

“We keep making progress. That’s what my focus is on.”

The Rangers didn’t play with quite the same verve as they did in the victory over the Sharks, but they were tenacious. And they got key performances from young’uns Georgiev, Brett Howden and Filip Chytil, even while Pavel Buchnevich sat out for the second straight game.

Chytil, still without a goal, made a key retrieval and nifty feed into the slot that glanced off Howden before Hayes converted on the power play for a 1-0 lead at 1:42 of the second period. Chytil, benched for the final 14:05 of the third plus overtime at San Jose, had not gotten a sniff of power-play time against the Sharks.

“He’s 19, and there are going to be ups and downs,” Quinn said of No. 72, whose final shift of this one ended with 10:01 remaining in the third period. “He and I talked about why he sat [against the Sharks]. It’s part of a long process.

“You don’t keep throwing young guys out there where that can create a little entitlement. They have to earn their keep.”

The Rangers didn’t allow much to the struggling Ducks (0-5-2 in their past seven) through the first 40 minutes. They withstood Anaheim’s attack throughout the third after Howden got the 2-1 goal off a dazzling, touch-relay feed from Jimmy Vesey at 14:29 of the second after the Ducks had tied it on Jakob Silfverberg’s power-play goal at 12:31.

“We might not have played as well as we did in San Jose, but I thought we backed it up,” Marc Staal said. “I think we did a lot of growing on this trip. Playing with the lead is so huge.”

The Rangers maintained the lead throughout the third, which included a strong penalty kill midway through the period. But chaos reigned in the final minute after a Tony DeAngelo clear banked off an official. The 6-on-5 phobia that began in the 2017 playoffs, when the Blueshirts were victimized three times, and continued last year through four such blown leads, lives.

“Obviously this can’t keep happening,” Hayes said. “We need to close out games to be considered a winning team.”

But a winning team is exactly what the Rangers were on this night, when Georgiev stood tall in a frenzied overtime before finishing it off in his first skills competition.

“Overtime is kind of crazy hockey,” the goaltender said of the three-on-three.

Even if not quite as crazy as hockey in the final minute with the Rangers attempting to protect a one-goal lead.