I have a lot of problems with you people and now you're gonna hear about it!
Standings points
Can we please move to a 3-2-1 system? I still can't believe this is a thing. How in the world can you run a league where certain games are worth more than others and it is completely random. The league clearly values regulation wins because they use them as a tiebreaker. How about you throw some standings points behind that. This is really easy. Three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime or shootout win, one point for reaching overtime. Also, play ten minutes of three on three overtime.
Stop marketing teams over players
The league has this incredibly backwards. I should say the sport has this incredibly backwards as far their approach to the business side of things. If you market individual players you can drive interest in the league no matter what night of the week it is. Hockey fans are groomed to be all in on their favorite team and when that team is either bad or knocked out of the playoffs there is little rooting interest around the league. Let's start to celebrate the individuals in this sport. Cheering for people regardless of team is a great way to stay engaged in the sport. Celebrating individuals may even bleed into coaching psyche and just maybe players who try to actually make plays won't be punished harsher than the players who never try anything and never do anything.
Hockey has an uphill battle compared to other sports in that the best players in the game are only out for a third of the game and usually only 45 seconds at a time. That's a definite hurdle and can't be ignored. However, just because the sport isn't perfect for marketing individuals doesn't mean you shouldn't want to be better at it. Do the best you can in the situation you have. The NHL doesn't do that at all. Any shred of personality is usually met with criticism by the old guard who is tired and boring. We are going to have a new generation of star players coming up. Start marketing them. I won't hold my breath though. They can't even get Conor freaking McDavid on American television.
Bigger suspensions
The only way players are going to change their ways is if you hit their wallet. These $5,000 fines and 1 or 2 game suspensions aren't a deterrent and neither are the players themselves. In addition to making suspensions more stern the league should institute Mario Lemieux's fine system at the team level. If your team accumulates a certain amount of games lost to suspension then not only does the player lose his money but the team will have to pay based on what tier they fall on. Think of it like unlocking things in video games after completing tasks except the opposite. The more you unlock the more you pay.
Olympics
Go to the Olympics. Start the season two weeks earlier so you don't have to mash a bunch of games together. Training camp doesn't need to be as long as it is anymore. It isn't like it used to be where the guys would do nothing all summer and then need three weeks to get their asses back in gear. Hockey is a 12 month sport for these players now. Once every four years the best of the best can play for their countries if that's something that interests them.
Olympic hockey is the best hockey we get to see. The best players playing under stricter rules that allow them to be the best is great. We only get it once every four years (World Championships need not apply). We'll see what comes of the World Cup in years to come, but that should work in concert with the Olympics not as a replacement. We should have a major international competition every two years with all the best players.
Blame the bad players
Perhaps because the sport is inherently Canadian is why we don't get more legitimate criticism for lower end players. Maybe everybody feels bad picking on the lowest hanging fruit? Whatever is causing this has created a double standard in how some of these players are talked about. In a sport where it is very tough for an individual to carry an entire team (outside of a hot goaltender) it seems that the best players are usually blamed the most. It is natural to want your best players to always play great, but this sport doesn't always reward a great process with great results. The natural random variance of the sport kills the scoring consistency of star players producing offense. Then when you throw the league's indifference to calling their own rules it makes it even tougher for better players to succeed. Sometimes these great players have to take chances to make things happen and occasionally it hurts the team. Those glaring mistakes get talked about to no end, but the bum who puts it high off the glass eight out of every ten times they touch the puck is rewarded for "playing it safe". This sport is so risk adverse it's crazy.
Restricted free agency/no RFA offers
The old boys club never wants to ruffle feathers and this is a problem considering the lottery draft system is a complete joke. The only way you can legitimately become a contender is if you are an average team that completely defies the odds of a draft lottery or you tank and take your chances with your 1/4 odds. This is so stupid. It takes all the skill out of running a team. If you are the GM of a rebuilding team you literally have to rely on luck because if you don't get one of those players in the top five you'll never get off the ground.
One of the few ways you could potentially use skill to acquire great players is one that nobody uses, leverage. So many opportunities of the last few years have popped up where you have a team close to the cap ceiling with one of their best young RFA players still awaiting a contract, yet all you hear is crickets. The thought here is that by sending an offer you will get blackballed or upset somebody else. Who cares?! Isn't every team trying to win? The fact this is a thing shows you how many petty insecure people get to run hockey teams. What well measured person couldn't understand the concept of leverage and why somebody else would use an offer sheet as a means of improving their team. Yeah, it would suck if it happened to your team, but perhaps be more planful.
Furthermore, let's talk about the whole RFA contract thing in general. It's garbage. It shouldn't exist in the first place. It is a crutch for executives. They are scared of losing their good players sooner and quite frankly some of them should based on how they run their teams. These players career tracks are so heavily influenced by the randomness of the NHL draft and it's sad. So many of their productive years are tied to one team with barely and ability to control it. The few players that do try to exercise this freedom (trade requests, college UFAs) are always demonized and it is rubbish. Players should hit unrestricted free agency sooner than they do. They deserve more control than they have. There is a hard cap in place. The same teams wouldn't be able to sign all the players like it used to be. You also wouldn't get players trying to get their one big pay day after they are capable of earning that big pay day. You'd be paying for future performance and not past performance.
I know people like the draft as an event, but it's an incredibly flawed way of distributing the top talent and is unfair to the players in many cases. With a hard cap you could have all players be unrestricted free agents out of college and juniors. You could have an amateur free agency day much like you do on July 1 and it would still be just as exciting and probably more so. It would add more skill to building a team and less randomness and that is something we should be striding towards in a sport that is dominated by randomness.
If the elimination of the NHL draft is too extreme then let's scrap the current system and use Micah Blake McCurdy's gold drafting system. He talks about the system here here and his presentations are always tremendous https://youtu.be/4hpPSiReZyw?t=2h46m12s
The gold system in a nutshell is that the day your team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs you are in a race to accumulate the most standings points until the end of the season. This eliminates tanking. If your team is eliminated sooner you'll have more time to accumulate those points, but there's also a reason you were out early.
Playoff format
The divisional format is objectively terrible. The concept of divisions is also terrible. It is dated and plays into the league marketing team rivalries instead of individuals as referenced above. You don't need to be divisional rivals to have an emotional playoff series. We have endless examples of this. The old format is boring, too.
The easiest and best solution to playoff seeding is to create a new made for TV event. This event will take place in prime time after the regular season concludes and it will involve the NHL general managers picking their opponents. Yeah, that's right I want to give the top seeds an actual advantage to the overly long regular season. It also creates instantaneous rivalries because the team picked will rally around the fact that they are being disrespected. Perfect, we need more of that in hockey. Of course this will never fly for the same reasons we can't get an RFA offer sheet.
There are no counterpoints to doing it this way when compared to how they are doing it now. This is an opportunity for the league to think outside of the box and do something interesting before other leagues do it. Any time the league can accomplish something like that they should. Vegas expansion is a good example of the league doing something before the other sports, but there aren't many other examples. This is an another easy one.
Consider my grievances aired. Now let's clear the room and get Gary Bettman in here because today doesn't end until one of us is pinned.