Another Bruin whiffs on the puck during the penalty shot.

Oh boy I bet Erik Haula was feeling pretty nervous during this sequence on Sunday night, even despite the fact that he is a 31 year old veteran with nearly a 10 year career in the National Hockey League behind him.

On Sunday during a game between the aforementioned Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens, Haula was gifted a penalty shot by the NHL officials on the ice after he was tangled up with Canadiens forward Mike Hoffman. The decision to award Haula with the penalty shot was a questionable one in my estimation and the Canadiens were clearly not at all happy about the call on the ice, but without that call we never would have been treated to this moment.

As Haula prepared to take his penalty shot it appears he channeled his inner Brad Marchand in order to whiff on the puck and skate right past it at the start of his penalty shot. Unlike Marchand has done in the past though Haula was fortunate enough to have whiffed the puck entirely which meant that he was still eligible to take the penalty shot. It is somewhat ironic that by making a bigger mistake he was punished less severely than Marchand was for his own blunder.

To his credit Haula was able to recover his composure and pick the puck back up for his scoring chance, and he would make good on that scoring chance by firing a shot past Canadiens goaltender Samuel Montembeault to give the Bruins a 2 - 0 lead in the game. It was an incredibly bizarre sequence of events from the initial call itself to the penalty shot and the whiff, followed by the goal.

Here's a look at the whiff and the goal that followed:

And if by chance you're not familiar with the incident involving Brad Marchand that I referenced here then I have you covered. Back in 2020 Marchand made a very similar mistake to the one that we saw from Haula today, except in Marchand's case the fact that he touched the puck made it considerably worse.