Kings’ Jonathan Quick keeps the Flyers at bay

All the diagrams coaches draw on dry-erase boards to illustrate their game plans, all the hours they spend analyzing opponents’ breakout patterns and penalty-killing schemes -- all of them can be a complete waste of ink and breath.

Sometimes what it takes to win is guts, guile, and a goaltender whose assurance is growing as rapidly as his save percentage.

The Kings didn’t do everything perfectly in a 2-1 shootout victory over the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday at Staples Center, and if the visitors hadn’t played the night before in Anaheim and hadn’t lost several forwards to injuries, the outcome might have been different.

But the persistence the Kings showed at crucial moments, combined with the poised performance of Jonathan Quick in his sixth successive start since his promotion from the American Hockey League, allowed them to start this calendar year with the belief that they’re shedding their bad, old habits one by significant one.

Quick stopped 31 shots over 65 minutes before playing his first NHL shootout -- and all he did there was foil NHL co-goalscoring leader Jeff Carter with a glove save and Mike Richards with a leg save. Patrick O’Sullivan beat Antero Niittymaki to the glove side and Dustin Brown lifted a wrist shot over the hapless goalie for the victory, delighting an announced sellout crowd of 18,118.

“That was one of those games where I don’t think we were our sharpest with our Xs and O’s and our system play,” Brown said, “but sometimes you have the compete and the passion to win, more than the other team.

“I think it really comes down to who wants it more in this league. If you play your system better it helps, but tonight we just came out and especially in the third we said, ‘We’re going to take this and go with it.’ ”

They went home with two hard-earned points against a team that last season went to the Eastern Conference finals and is atop the Atlantic Division this season. For the Kings, trying to keep the Western Conference playoff pack within range, it was a landmark moment.

“From the standpoint of a team concept it was a step forward, I think, from when we’ve been struggling in those third periods,” Brown said, referring to a stretch early last month in which the Kings squandered third-period leads in three consecutive games.

“This period was much different for us. Our attitude on the ice was much different.”

Their goaltender is different, too.

In the four days since their last game they traded Jason LaBarbera to Vancouver for a seventh-round draft pick, leaving Quick and Erik Ersberg to share the nets. LaBarbera was a nice enough guy but left too many fat rebounds and was awful in one-on-one situations. On some level, his teammates knew it.

Quick has been remarkably calm and technically sound. He stopped a first-period penalty shot by Scott Hartnell by forcing Hartnell to take a backhander that went wide, and the only goal he gave up in the first 65 minutes resulted from a turnover by the Kings and a pass that put Hartnell in alone to the right of the net at 3 minutes 1 second of the second period.

The Kings pulled even during a power play, at 16:05 of the second period, on a long wrist shot by Wayne Simmonds.

Quick’s unflappable nature is similar to Ersberg’s.

“That trickles down the bench from player to player, and players start making better plays with the puck and have better patience with the puck,” Brown said. “When you have a calm goalie in net it just calms the whole team down and you play a better team game.”

Quick said he had some definite ideas of what he’d do in the shootout.

“Carter, I knew he’s a big shooter and I was anticipating a shot and that paid off,” Quick said. “The second shooter, Richards, I tried to wait him out and be patient. I tried to give him as little as possible and it ended up working out, too.”

He said he likes the NHL’s tie-breaking procedure, no surprise given his even-tempered demeanor.

“I enjoy them. They’re a lot of fun,” he said. “I like what it brings to the game. There’s a little more excitement for the fans than just playing overtime and leaving it a tie.”

These fans were clearly excited by the Kings’ performance, no matter who was or wasn’t in the Flyers’ lineup. Coach Terry Murray, a former Flyers coach and an assistant there before he took the Kings’ job, rarely shows excitement but pronounced this “a good win for us.”

That it was. A few more like it and there may be valid reasons to believe that this rebuilding thing is moving at more than a glacial pace.

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helene.elliott@latimes.com