Dustin Penner's Pancake Injury and the Offer Sheet Feud

Dustin Penner, former forward with the Edmonton Oilers

Dustin Penner won the Stanley Cup with Anaheim in 2007 and with Los Angeles in 2012, scored an overtime goal that sent the Kings to the Final and was at the center of the most heated offer sheet of the salary cap era. Yet the story fans still bring up first is about breakfast. In January 2012, a plate of pancakes kept him out of the lineup.

The pancake injury that cost Dustin Penner a game

On a Saturday in January 2012, Dustin Penner sat down at home to eat pancakes, leaned forward and felt his back seize. He couldn’t stand up straight, made it to the rink anyway, and the Kings’ training staff sent him home. Los Angeles lost 1-0 to Columbus without him, Fox Sports reported, quoting the interview Penner gave LA Kings Insider.

“I woke up fine, sat down to eat and it locked right up. It never happened to me before,” he said. He described the spasm as a pain that “wraps around you and squeezes” and joked that it was one of those mysterious things that can happen from a sneeze. He was back at practice the next day.

The timing made it stick. Penner was having a quiet season in Los Angeles, and the story spread across every hockey site within hours. The joke followed him for the rest of his career, and it got a final twist two years later: Anaheim traded him to Washington in March 2014, on Shrove Tuesday, better known in Canada as Pancake Tuesday.

Dustin Penner’s offer sheet and the barn in Lake Placid

Five years earlier, Penner was the subject of a front-office war. In July 2007, weeks after he won the Cup with Anaheim, Edmonton general manager Kevin Lowe signed the restricted free agent to an offer sheet worth $ 21.25 million over five years, or $ 4.25 million a season. Anaheim declined to match on August 2, 2007, and received Edmonton’s first, second, and third-round picks in the 2008 draft as compensation.

Anaheim general manager Brian Burke was furious. He called the offer an act of desperation, and the feud with Lowe, until then a close friend, escalated to the point where Burke offered to settle it in a rented barn in Lake Placid. Commissioner Gary Bettman stepped in before anything happened. We have told that story in full when Brian Burke challenged Kevin Lowe to fight in a barn. Penner later compared being caught in the middle to a child watching his parents argue.

On the ice, Edmonton got what it paid for. Penner scored 32 goals and 63 points in 2009-10, both career highs, and averaged close to a goal every three games as an Oiler.

From Maine walk-on to two Stanley Cups

Penner’s route to the NHL was unusual even before the offer sheet. He grew up in Winkler, Manitoba, was considered too small as a teenager, and never played major junior hockey. After two seasons of junior college hockey in North Dakota, he reached the University of Maine, joined the varsity in 2003-04, and helped the Black Bears reach the NCAA championship game. He was never drafted and signed with Anaheim as a free agent.

He scored 29 goals as an NHL rookie in 2006-07 and won the Cup that June, adding 3 goals and 8 points in 21 playoff games. He won his second title with Los Angeles, which acquired him from Edmonton late in the 2010-11 season. In the 2012 playoffs, he had 11 points in 20 games, and on 22 May 2012 he scored at 17:42 of overtime in Game 5 of the Western Conference final to beat Phoenix 4-3 and send the Kings to their first Stanley Cup Final since 1993. Los Angeles beat New Jersey in six games for the franchise’s first championship.

What happened to Dustin Penner?

Dustin Penner’s last NHL season was 2013-14, which he split between Anaheim and Washington. He finished with 589 regular-season games, 151 goals, and two championship rings, and he has kept a low profile since then, with occasional guest appearances on hockey podcasts.

Be careful what you see online: a woodworking channel run by a different Dustin Penner is sometimes linked to the former Kings forward, but it isn’t him.

Dustin Penner’s career in numbers

Season	Team	GP	G	A	P
2005-06	Anaheim	19	4	3	7
2006-07	Anaheim	82	29	16	45
2007-08	Edmonton	82	23	24	47
2008-09	Edmonton	78	17	20	37
2009-10	Edmonton	82	32	31	63
2010-11	Edmonton and Los Angeles	81	23	22	45
2011-12	Los Angeles	65	7	10	17
2012-13	Los Angeles	33	2	12	14
2013-14	Anaheim and Washington	67	14	21	35
Total		589	151	159	310

Figures are from Hockey-Reference. He added 13 goals and 35 points in 78 playoff games.

Dustin Penner scored 93 goals in 304 games for Edmonton, the team that gave up three draft picks to get him, but only 11 in 117 games for Los Angeles. The Kings, not the Oilers, won a Stanley Cup with him.