[19Yzerman19]

On the diving thing... You can't base calls on reputation, particularly not explicitly, because player reputations are usually only tenuously connected to reality. They're also media-driven. In reality, Dustin Brown is the absolute worst diver in the league and yet it took forever for that to be commonly accepted because the media didn't see fit to push that narrative. Not to mention, I do not want an NHL where players, coaches (coughClaudeJuliencough) and GM's attempt to win games by pursuing a marketing agenda in every post-game presser in the hopes that it will earn them an extra power play. There is a rule against embellishment on the books, if referees simply call it when they believe they've seen it, things will improve. Even the "no more offsetting penalties" thing is stupid - the vast majority of embellishment is in situations where there's actually been an infraction and the guy on the wrong end of it is exaggerating to make sure the referees actually notice.

As for people in here calling for 5 and a game, suspensions, etc for diving, imagine a game 7 of the conference finals, the Red Wings down 3-2 with 8 minutes left. Henrik Zetterberg gets his stick up and narrowly misses hitting Joe Thornton in the face by a few inches. Thornton, out of instinct, snaps his head back, and loses his footing. It looks exactly like a huge dive. Every replay makes it look terrible. The refs call him for a major and Detroit scores twice on the major and wins the series. But he WASN'T trying to embellish - he just reacted. He didn't think about it. That is the worst case scenario, but it's not hard to see that happening. The diving issue is complex and if there was an easy fix it would have been tried by now because no one likes it. But it's not a simple problem when you're trying to guess what players were thinking. A player who gets tripped, falls awkwardly and loses his stick might be playing it up for a call, or he might legitimately just have been off-balance. That's a pretty tough judgment call to make, and having the stakes be raised, you're going to get a lot of games decided by refs who got it wrong.

I do agree with the article that the way announcers look at the issue should change, shaming them rather than chuckling about it - "he, uh, went down a little easy there!" or whatever. Obviously they do this because unless you're JR or Milbury and don't care, you actually want to have a good relationship with the players you'll be getting on a plane with in 2 hours, and publicly lambasting them for being unsportsmanlike cheaters runs contrary to that. So I don't know how realistic it is.

The second thing is the late hits rule. I don't know how anyone who knows anything about playing hockey can suggest this. By getting rid of the puck over glass rule and replacing it with this you've effectively swapped one "worst hockey rule ever" for another. This isn't football, guys are on ice on skates. When you've committed to hitting a guy, it is basically impossible to avoid that collision for a period of time, depending on your speed. In many cases attempting to do so presents a serious risk of injury (half-avoiding a hit and winging a guy on the knee, for example). If you wanted to remove hitting altogether, this would be a good way to do it, because no one would ever be practically capable of going for a hit in a way that they could be sure wouldn't result in a penalty. Ever.