By Janik Beichler



At 25 years old, Austin Czarnik has 59 NHL games with the Boston Bruins on his résumé, scoring 17 points. Of those 59 games, 49 came in the 2016-17 season, his first year out of college. Then, in 2017-18, the Bruins limited him to just 10 games, forcing him to spend the majority of the year with AHL Providence.



Yet, the Calgary Flames decided to sign him to a two-year, one-way contract with an annual salary of $1.25 million – clearly, they see something in him the Bruins didn’t.



As The Athletic’s Kent Wilson noted, Czarnik, who scored 25 goals and 69 points in 64 AHL contests last season, has some interesting NHL comparables. Tampa’s Tyler Johnson and Yanni Gourde as well as Vegas’s Jonathan Marchessault all had similar AHL careers and made the NHL full time at a similar age.



While these comparisons are no guarantee for anything, they do prompt the question: What can Czarnik provide the...