Calgary Flames sign RW Austin Czarnik to two-year contract
By Ramina Shlah
The Calgary Flames have signed another player on Free Agency! They signed RW Austin Czarnik to a two-year deal.
Move over John Tavares, the Calgary Flames have themselves a high-profile signing (again)! They have signed RW Austin Czarnik to two-year contract with an AAV of $1.25 million. This name doesn’t sound too familiar to you? Well, no worries, he hasn’t exactly made a big name for himself in the NHL.
But the AHL is a different story.
He was one of the best AHL players in the league last season where he posted 25 goals and 69 points in 64 games with the Providence Bruins. He played in just ten games with the Boston Bruins last season and 59 NHL games total with the Bruins where he has five goals and 17 points.
Heading into Free Agency, Czarnik was on many teams’ radars. Apparently, 2/3rds of the league wanted him, making me think that he was going to be expecting a higher pay check. It’s quite exciting that out of about 20 teams, he chose the Flames. We actually wrote about him in our “Ten free agents the Flames should target”. So go us!
This will be Czarnik’s first one-way contract with an NHL team. He’s a right-shooting RW, something the Flames desperately need. He can provide lots of depth on that right side, it just depends on where the Flames want to place him and who they’ll be getting rid of, basically.
I’m crossing my fingers for one of the players to be Garnet Hathaway, who doesn’t quite contribute a whole lot to the team (no offence to any big Hathaway fans out there).
Next: Flames sign Derek Ryan to three-year contract
Czarnik is on a cheap two-year contract and it’s absolutely a low-risk high-reward type of deal. It may be somewhat of a risk to sign him on a one-way contract since he’s mainly played in just the AHL, but again, there’s lots of potential for a big reward out of him.