He Makes the Big Leap

On the road to the NHL, young players usually take one of three paths -- play junior hockey in Canada, star for a U.S. college team or make a name overseas.

Dustin Penner didn’t do any of those. And that makes his star turn in this year’s playoffs all the more remarkable.

In 12 playoff games, the 23-year-old rookie has three goals and six assists for nine points. Two of those goals came at the start of Thursday’s must-win Game 4 against the Edmonton Oilers, setting the tone for a 6-3 victory and helping to bring the series back to Anaheim tonight for Game 5.

It was only four weeks ago that Penner was in the playoffs for the Portland Pirates, the Ducks’ American Hockey League affiliate in Maine. That’s when the call for help came -- the Ducks needed him against the gritty Calgary Flames during the first round of the NHL playoffs. At 6 feet 4 and 245 pounds, he gave the team badly needed heft on the ice. It worked.

Penner then made the Western Conference semifinals against the Colorado Avalanche his showcase.

In Game 2, he set up Joffrey Lupul with a slick pass that led to the final goal in a 3-0 victory. In Game 3, he set up three of Lupul’s franchise-record four goals, including the winner in overtime. In Game 4, he capped it off with another jaw-dropping set-up pass for Todd Marchant and then was on the receiving end from his linemate for the first playoff goal of his career in the 4-1 victory.

Not bad for a guy who had not been drafted, had played only two seasons of professional hockey and appeared in only 19 regular-season games for the Ducks. But his statistics from Portland -- 39 goals and 45 assists in 57 games -- proved he was more than merely a big guy on skates.

Teammate Teemu Selanne compares him to veteran power forward John LeClair, now with Pittsburgh. LeClair has had 404 goals in his career.

“You don’t see those kind of hands very often with a big boy like him,” Selanne said of Penner. “When that guy has everything together

“It’s hard to move those guys because they have such good balance, and they’re big boys,” he added.

It wasn’t always this good for Penner.

The Ducks’ forward started out by playing high school hockey in his hometown of Winkler, Canada, a quaint town about 75 miles south of Winnipeg.

In Canada, however, teens aspiring to the NHL don’t bother with high school hockey. “I felt like I was on the outside looking in,” Penner acknowledged. “I was looking far away with binoculars.”

He was cut from every junior team he tried to make. At 5-8 and 120 pounds, Penner wasn’t considered big enough. Undeterred, he kept playing.

“As a 16-year-old kid, you want to be playing at a high level,” he said. “You want to be playing Tier A, like the Western Hockey League, or Tier II. High school is third on the list. But I had a great time. It’s still hockey. It’s just not the best hockey.”

Penner, realizing he wasn’t even a blip on the hockey radar, knew he had to do something. He enrolled at Minot State-Bottineau, a community college in North Dakota, and made the cut as a walk-on.

It was there that Grant Standbrook, a University of Maine assistant, found a raw but skilled kid who suddenly was gaining in height and weight advantage. Standbrook was going on instinct.

“We were driving through Carman and we had seen a sign with Eddie Belfour on it,” Penner recalled of a drive through the tiny city near Winnipeg. “He said, ‘One day, there’ll be a Dustin Penner sign.’ My parents and I looked at each other and in our minds, we thought, ‘This guy needs to settle down a bit. I’m playing at a junior college.’ It was flattering. But he didn’t have to sell me the farm to get me there.”

In Penner’s only season at Maine, he had 23 points in 43 games and propelled the Black Bears to the NCAA title game with his game-winning goal over Boston College. David McNab, the Ducks’ assistant general manager, went to scout the winger on the advice of Standbrook.

In Penner, McNab saw something familiar -- the skills of his brother Peter McNab, who scored 363 goals with four teams in 14 NHL seasons.

“Peter was a great big guy who had talent,” McNab said. “[Dustin] was a very good player who got better and better every time I saw him play. He just hadn’t played enough against high-caliber competition.”

David McNab remembered talking to Penner after a triple-overtime game in the Hockey East semifinals in Boston.

“As the game went on and on, he was so good and so powerful,” David McNab said of Penner. “It just seemed like everybody else was wearing down.”

Teammate Rob Niedermayer knows how difficult the road that brought Penner to the NHL was.

“It’s an unbelievable story considering where he came from,” Niedermayer said.

Selanne agreed.

“You just have to shake your head and say, ‘Wow, what a story.’ Every team where he started playing, he can’t make the team. All of a sudden at the end of the year, he’s the best player. That has been the case everywhere he’s played so far.”

Penner doesn’t think much about those who repeatedly overlooked him.

“I always wondered why I wasn’t chosen,” he said. “Why I always wasn’t good enough at that age? But it isn’t always whether or not you’re good enough.

“There’s really nothing to worry about now.”

Except maybe winning tonight.

“Biggest game of the year,” Penner said.