VANCOUVER, British Columbia — There was quite a bit of anger from the Rangers bench, with Ryan Strome banging his stick against the glass to get the officials’ attention, and the rest of the bench screaming in protest.

But they were still hit with a rare face-off violation penalty during the 2-1 loss to the Canucks on Saturday night that ended the road trip on a sour note.

The play happened at 17:23 of the second period, with Filip Chytil first getting kicked out of an offensive-zone face-off. Greg McKegg came in to take the draw, and he seemingly did something wrong in the eyes of the linesman — who kicked him out, too.

But kicking two players out of the same face-off is an automatic penalty, normally reserved for defensive-zone draws after icings when the defending team is trying to catch its breath. Strome thought that the linesman actually just forgot the rule, but was forced to enforce it once it all went down.

“Thankfully we killed off the penalty,” said Strome, whose team went 3-for-3 on the penalty kill.

Coach David Quinn was undecided on which goalie he wanted to start this game, but once he heard that Henrik Lundqvist was “under the weather” for the past two days, that made it easy. He gave the start to Alexandar Georgiev, who made 25 saves in his third start of this four-game road trip.

“I was debating what to do, then Hank wasn’t feeling great on [Friday] morning, and we were kicking around what to do,” Quinn said. “When I heard that, I pretty much made the decision to play Georgie.”

Old friend J.T. Miller had a quiet night for the Canucks, no points and a first-period slashing penalty, a rarity in his terrific season where he is second on the team with 40 points.

Chris Kreider collected an assist, and now has a least one point in 10 of the past 13 games, putting up 13 points (six goals and seven assists) in that span. He has tallied 26 points this season, and 23 of the 26 points have either been a goal or the primary assist on a goal.

The lineup stayed the same for the third straight game, with Brendan Smith in as a fourth-line winger and Micheal Haley as the healthy scratch.

Quinn barely played the fourth line, with Smith getting 5:44 and Steven Fogarty getting a game-low 3:16. Smith did get some work on the penalty kill when Brady Skjei was in the box for high-sticking.

The other member of that line, McKegg, was occasionally moved up and played 7:22 while registering two shots on goal.

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