There may not be a more fascinating player in the NHL today than Dustin Penner.
Superficially, he’s everything a team wants in a player. Listed at 6’4”, 247 pounds, he has the frame for a game obsessed (often to a fault) with size. In a league that values clutch play and championship experience, he has won two Stanley Cups, playing important minutes for his teams in both cases. He has scored 30 goals, routinely scores 20 and virtually every major league club he’s ever played for has performed better with him on the ice than with him off it.
And yet he’s spent much of that same career in the doghouse of his coaches. From Randy Carlyle in Anaheim to Craig MacTavish in Edmonton to Darryl Sutter in Los Angeles, Penner has found himself out of favour all too frequently. These aren’t bad coaches, either; two of them guided their teams to Cup wins, and the departure of the third (MacTavish) coincided exactly with the Oilers’ descent to the NHL basement.
Penner’s always been something of an oddity for an NHL player, and his development route was so odd it doesn’t q ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
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December 19th, 2013 by Jonathan Willis Leave a reply »
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