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Switzerland gets awarded two penalty shots on same play, fail to capitalize on either

December 31, 2018

You're lucky if you see your favorite hockey team get awarded a handful of penalty shots in an entire season, and it's extremely rare to see the call made twice in the same game. On Sunday, in a World Juniors Championship preliminary round game between Switzerland and Russia, not only were there two penalty shots, but they were awarded to the Swiss team on the same play. Fair to say this is a once-in-a-lifetime type of occurrence.

With the puck free in the neutral zone, Switzerland's Marco Lehmann beat Russian defenseman Dmitri Samorukov to the puck and skated into the Russian zone for what appeared to be a breakaway. That's when Samorukov tripped him not once, but twice, leading to the official calling TWO penalty shots. If you thought that was crazy, have a look at what the Swiss team did with said penalty shots in a 3-3 game:

You LOSE! You get NOTHING! Good DAY sir!

Could you possibly have two worse attempts than those two? First was Lehmann, the guy who was tripped up in the first place, just straight up losing the puck and not even attempting a shot. Then Philipp Kurashev damn near put one in the rafters, failing to even put it on goal. What a waste, and one that proved to be costly as Russia went on to win 7-4 despite nearly giving away a pair of free goals. All we need now is an assessment of what went wrong from Christian Wohlwend, the Swiss head coach who provided this gem of a video at last year's World Juniors before his team faced Canada:

This year, they nearly upset Canada, only losing 3-2 to a team that had just beat Denmark 14-0 the night before. This time, Wohlwend was much more optimistic about his team:

Guy is a beauty. Now he just needs to teach them how to hit the net on a penalty shot.