If you read carefully I never said he was scratched, I understand he's injured as he's basically partially the reason I've been paying attention to the Kraken as I liked him a lot on the Jets. But he was playing on the second line in Winnipeg and was playing fantastic. In Seattle he's on the 3rd/4th line and in Philly Hakstol would always play vets over young players.
If he was playing on the first/second line I think he'd definitely put up more points and help the team win, but there's one Wright way for Seattle it seems.
Winnipeg's top two lines were almost exclusively a combination of Wheeler - Sheifele -Stastny - Ehlers - Dubois - Connor.
Appleton played 14 minutes a night last season with the jets and skated almost exclusively with Lowry and Copp. The trio scored .66 goals a game combined. that is a .22 goals a game average per player. While Copp did have the 5th most PP time for forwards, Lowry and Appleton were 8th and 10th, respectively.
Not sure if you are trolling with this argument, or don't actually watch the games.
But in regards to Seattle, the team doesn't have a clear cut top six. Hakstol is throwing all lines out there and expecting them to be scoring lines. Playing with Tanev and McCann is not really a drop off from playing with Wennberg or Jarnkrok.
Granted, his icetime has been realtively low, but part of that is that he was injured early in one game and has only played 8 games, so that skewed the stat quite a bit too.
Bottom line, he hasn't played great to warrant substantial icetime yet. He played pretty good in his return last game, but still made some mistakes. He needs to clean up his game away from the puck, and he should get more minutes.
