4. Full two-minute power plays
For much of the first 50 years of the NHL’s history, players assessed a minor penalty remained in the box for the whole two minutes, regardless of how many power-play goals were tallied during their sentence. But the Montreal Canadiens’ power play was so dominant in the 1950s that commencing with the start of the 1956-57 season, the league adopted its current policy that a penalized player be free from the penalty box the moment his team surrenders a power-play marker.

New Jersey Devils general manager Lou Lamoriello thinks it’s time for a little retro thinking. He wants the league to go back to the pre-1956 agenda and leave penalized players in the sin bin for the entire two minutes. Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman, who won a record nine Stanley Cups, doesn’t go that far, but feels that any foul involving a stick infraction should be served in its entirely. Bowman figures this would play a role in curbing obstruction.

“If you know you’re going to sit there for the entire two minutes, you’re going to think twice about putting your stick on another guy,” Bowman said.

Both versions are ideas with merit. Either way, the game is opened up more and fouls become more costly to the cheaters.

5. Shrink goalies, bend sticks
Do the math. Goalies get bigger and bigger, goal production goes down and down. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, or a Russian Rocket (a.k.a., Pavel Bure) to deduce that there is a correlation here. “Guys like me, we couldn’t hit an open net, but even the goal scorers now say they just can’t see any openings anywhere,” Colorado Avalanche defenseman Bob Boughner said. “Something has to be done.”

Anaheim's Jean-Sebastien Giguere is one of several goalies who has been accused of using bulky equipment

Already, the league limited the length of a goaltender’s pads to 38 inches, but something must also be to decrease the bulk of their body armor. There’s also a safety issue here, so the movers and shakers of the game must be careful. Hockey can’t go back to the old days when a goalie wore little more than felt padding above the waist. With the new composite sticks on the market allowing even fringe players to fire the puck like a missile, such a backtrack would lead to goalie carnage of the most appalling order.

There is one retro move that hockey could fit into this category that would put a little spice back into the game. Bring back the unlimited curved stick. Chicago’s Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita brought the banana blade into vogue in the 1960s, making the puck act like a high-speed knuckleball. The NHL moved to limit curvature in stick blades during the early 1970s, eventually settling on a half-inch as the barometer. They feared for the safety of the netminder at the time, but with goalies so well protected today, it’s time to take the shackles off the shooters and let them bend their blades to their heart’s content. Remember, fans don’t pay to watch goalies stop the puck. They buy tickets to see goals scored.

6. In with the shootout
This topic might be sacrilege amongst the so-called hockey purists, but if the objective is to put the excitement back in the game, what better way than deciding the outcome of games via a shootout?

“Bottom line, we’re in the entertainment business,” said former Florida Panthers general manager Rick Dudley, a proponent of the shootout. Dudley experienced the shootout’s impact on the sport while GM of the Detroit Vipers in the International Hockey League. “Let me tell you, those games were entertaining.”

Dudley receives support for this idea from an unlikely source in Detroit Red Wings goalie Manny Legace, even though Legace was part of the 1994 Canadian Olympic team which lost the gold medal to Sweden in a shootout. “I look around the rink late in the game and even if the score is tied, people are still leaving,” Legace said. “You think anybody would leave if they knew there was a chance they were going to see Mario Lemieux and Dominik Hasek going one-on-one?”

Keep the four-on-four five-minute overtime period intact, but if the score remains deadlocked, bring on the skills competition aspect of the shootout. And lose the point that is currently awarded to the losing team for a regulation tie. Life doesn’t reward failure. Hockey shouldn’t, either.

7. Return to one referee
In principle, the two-referee system made sense. It merited a chance. But now, it’s run out of chances.

No matter how many referees are on the ice, not everyone is going to be happy.

The idea was that the second referee would follow the play and eliminate much of the hooking and holding away from the puck, with the intent of speeding up the game. But what has resulted is a rash of unnecessary penalties and a complete loss of flow to the game, not to mention confusion amongst the players as to what constitutes an infraction.

Every referee handles a game differently and when there was only one of them out there, the players could quickly grasp what he was going to call and what he was going to let go. With two whistle blowers, confusion reigns. Discretion has gone the way of the maskless goaltender. The game is filled with stoppages, its tedious and there’s very little pace.

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