CALGARY, Alberta _ Henrik Lundqvist turned 36 on Friday, and his Rangers teammates gave him the best birthday present of all: a second straight win.
Not that Lundqvist didn't have to do a ton of work himself to earn this present. Two nights after stopping 50 shots in a win over Vancouver, the goaltender made 50 more against the Flames, many of them amazing. And goals by red-hot Kevin Hayes, Pavel Buchnevich and Ryan Spooner led the Rangers to a 3-1 victory over the battling-for-their-playoff-lives Calgary Flames at the Saddledome Friday night.
The Rangers have won the first two games of this Western Canada swing, with the final game of the trip coming Saturday night in Edmonton against the rebuilding Oilers.
Spooner, in only his third game with the club since coming over from Boston Sunday in the Rick Nash trade, continued his hot play, with a goal and an assist to give him seven points with the Rangers.
Vladislav Namestnikov, who came over from Tampa Bay at the trade deadline Monday, didn't have a point, but did hit a post (the Rangers hit five of those in the game) and played another strong game.
Rangers coach Alain Vigneault was asked before Friday's game what Wednesday's crazy 6-5 win over Vancouver had done for the team's psyche.
"We're in this to win," he said. "We haven't won a lot lately. I think that last game, obviously, cheered everybody up and hopefully we took a step in the right direction here. We did a lot of good things in that game: capitalized early, had a good start. I'm hoping we'll be able to do the same thing tonight."
And they did, taking the lead at 4:07 of the first period on a goal by Hayes, his career-high 18th of the season. Hayes jammed in the rebound of a shot by Spooner that came directly off a right circle faceoff against Calgary's Sean Monahan.
But the Flames, as Vigneault called them, are "a desperate team" that started the day one point out of the final playoff spot in the Western Conference. And they kept coming at the Rangers, eventually tying the score when Brett Kulak buried a rebound with 3:21 left in the period. By the end of the period, after Lundqvist made one last left pad save on a shot through a screen just before the buzzer, the Flames had a 19-9 advantage in shots.
The Rangers, though, retook the lead at 56 seconds of the second period, when Buchnevich banked a wraparound backhander from behind the net off the skates of Calgary goalie Jon Gillies that held up when video review determined that the entire puck crossed the goal line. And then Spooner made it 3-1 when he took a pass up the middle from Tony DeAngelo and beat Gillies on a breakaway at 10:48 of the period for his first goal as a Ranger
