I started a thread called "How to fix NHL referreeing" or something like that last year and was told there wasn't a problem by what I considered to be a surprising number of people.
I think the biggest problem is that referees are, as far as any of us can tell, not held accountable in any meaningful way for things like consistency, or bad calls, or poor handling of situations.
Remember Ovechkin's "non goal" in the shootout last season? He knew it was an awarded goal because the goaltender cannot throw his stick (the wording of the rule is actually even clearer). But the refs wouldn't hear of it until home office phoned and said "Uh, yeah, guys, that's a goal, the game's over." Bad look, but really the issue is that the refs involved had a big huddle and STILL botched the call.
So training is part of it, dedicated professional refs and ref schools, year round.
Another part of it is getting a replay system that makes sense, coach's challenges which make sense, and again, making sure that the game is called reasonably fairly and reasonably consistently. Anyone who thinks that game-management isn't a real thing is watching something else than I am. I can't believe the things that get called vs the things that don't (and I'm not suggesting this favors the Flames or any other team, I have a suspicion it favors the home team somewhat).
Anothernother part of it would be if the NHL would come out and say "Yeah, we blew this." or if the referees would have to explain why they didn't call a hook on a scoring chance after a game, I think it would go a long way to making things more consistent. It would have the disadvantage of then there would be about 280 penalties every game - you probably don't WANT them to call EVERYthing.
I think the officiating in the last two years has been pretty bad, egregiously bad in many cases - the 5 minute major for the weird Pavelski incident, that kind of thing. There has to be a way to remedy this in nearly real time.
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