Austin Czarnik

Five-foot-nine, undrafted, born in Detroit, and 171 games across five organisations.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2016-17	BOS	49	5	8	13	-10	12	0	0	1	66	7.6	13:01
2017-18	BOS	10	0	4	4	-1	0	0	0	0	7	0.0	10:55
2018-19	CGY	54	6	12	18	-1	8	0	0	3	65	9.2	11:20
2019-20	CGY	8	2	1	3	+1	0	1	0	0	9	22.2	10:11
2020-21	NYI	4	0	0	0	-1	0	0	0	0	2	0.0	12:30
2021-22	NYI/SEA	17	2	5	7	+5	0	0	0	0	14	14.3	10:54
2022-23	DET	29	3	2	5	-4	8	0	0	0	27	11.1	11:10
2023-24 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	171	18	32	50	-11	28	1	0	4	190	9.5	11:42

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

3 goals and 2 assists in 29 games, minus-4, 11:10 a night.

49.5 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 306 minutes, the 48th percentile — average, which on this club is a compliment — with his ice at 9-10 against an expectation of 10.80-11.04. On 306 minutes it is a footnote.

Seven seasons, 171 games, 50 points, and he has never played more than 54 in a year.

The Finesse Game

27 shots at a median of 23 feet, 43 per cent from inside twenty.

Inside forty: 22 shots, three goals. Beyond forty: 3 shots, none.

83.7 mph at the 8th percentile. For a 170-pound forward without a shot, everything has to come from the passing, and 32 assists in 171 games is not enough of it.

He was a point-a-game player in the American league for years and it has never crossed over.

The Physical Game

5-9 and 170 pounds — one of the smallest forwards in this edition. 21.2 mph at the 6th percentile, 0.4 bursts a game at the 18th, 1.87 miles a game at the 10th.

That is close to the bottom of the feed on every measure, and for a player this size it is the whole explanation of a career spent on the fourth line and in the minors.

8 penalty minutes in 29 games. He is not physical and could not be.

The Intangibles

Undrafted, out of Miami of Ohio, and born in Detroit — one of the few players in this book playing for the club in the city he was born in.

He is 30 with 171 NHL games and a very good American-league record. That is a career, and the five organisations that have tried him have all reached the same conclusion.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

undrafteda strength· arrived without a pick attached
“Undrafted, out of Miami of Ohio, and born in Detroit”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 306 minutes

Expected goals: 49.5%; 48th pct
Shot attempts: 46.8%; 28th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 9 for, 10 against. Expected: 10.8 and 11.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

2nd

Numbers

48th

The numbers rank him 46 points above where the report does. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 49 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 29 games

Top speed: 21.2 mph; 17th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.38 a game
Distance: 1.87 miles a game
Hardest shot: 83.7 mph; 30th pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2022-23 · 306 minutes at five-on-five

Jonatan Berggren56%
Joseph Veleno34%
Alex Chiassonoff the roster29%

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2022-23

The club: DET took 46.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.5% — 3.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 306 minutes at five-on-five — 7th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jonatan Berggren	54.4%	41.2%	46.4%
Joe Veleno	47.7%	50.4%	45.2%
Jordan Oesterle	42.9%	54.0%	45.9%

54.4% together, 41.2% for him apart and 46.4% for Berggren apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

35 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 3 of them goals. His median goal came from 28 feet. 43% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 14% from beyond forty.