The Breakers were pre-season favourites for the Australian National Basketball League (ANBL) but have begun the season with a 50-50 split of four games.
They have also lost Penney, last year's most valuable player in the ANBL, to a back injury for an estimated four weeks.
The Breakers didn't have a great record without Penney last season, but with CJ Bruton leading the way, they clawed back a 14-point deficit soon after halftime to beat the Melbourne Tigers last Thursday.
They next take on the Wollongong Hawks on Saturday, and Breakers coach Andrej Lemanis said the rest of the team knew they needed to improve their offence in Penney's absence.
"It's put us in a situation where we are forced to ensure our structures are right offensively...because we don't have Kirk to bail us out with some miracle shot," he said.
"We have to get scores out of the offence and I think we showed against the Tigers that when we run our offence well and efficiently we can generate easy baskets out of it.
"If the offence is humming and we are flowing and finding those synergies and how to get the easy baskets, then certainly adding Kirk back into that puzzle will be a nice touch." Improving on the road has been a major goal for the Breakers in the past two seasons and their away losses against the Tigers and Adelaide at the beginning of the month showed it is still something to work on.
The Breakers don't have a great record away against the Hawks either, but experienced forward Dillon Boucher said the team was well capable of dealing with it.
"At the end of the day it's just another game and it's just on a different court and mentally that's the way we approach it as a team," he said.
"We don't approach it any different to a home game, it's just that the fans are booing us, rather than cheering." The Hawks were not among the predicted top contenders during the off season but they won a pre-season tournament in Darwin, beating the Breakers in the final, and they have won both their home games this season.
Lemanis said they played a good style of basketball, pushing the ball quickly from defence into attack through imported guard Tywain McKee and executing their offence well.
"The challenge for us is to take away their defensive transition, and that's through commitment to the defensive transition," he said.
"But that's also executing offensively so they don't get any easy stops as a result of loose turnovers or poor shots, and then trying to disrupt their offensive flow and try to turn it into a bit of a one on one game."
