Debate improves NHL

Adam Proteau of The Hockey News says debate must continue if the NHL is to improve.

Said criticisms usually come in the form of the following argument: “The game is great as it is. We’ve already made enough changes to it, so why can’t people just enjoy it and leave it be?”
On some levels, I understand and agree with that sentiment. But I also believe there’s an inherent, significant danger to the notion of being satisfied with the status quo.
Indeed, there are more than a couple people who will tell you the lack of serious debate about the NHL’s product throughout the 1990s led directly to the Dead Puck/Clutch-and-Grab Era that tested even the most devout hockey fans’ ability to keep their eyelids in the ‘up’ position during games.

Yet Ray Slover and Eric McErlain want to keep the goalie gear the same, the status quo.
Enough already: Leave goaltenders alone
Give NHL rule changes a breather

In this argument, I couldn't agree more with Proteau. He continues...
It wasn’t simply an absence of analysis that hurt the NHL so badly. It’s the aforementioned attitude that eschews all critical comment as being somehow offensive that truly hamstrings the sport.
To wit: Hall of Fame-bound NHLers such as Brett Hull and Mario Lemieux were labeled as whiners and me-first mopers during their playing careers merely for telling the hockey world what it has since come to accept: the game needed fixing – and not in a minor way.
For having the stones to speak up, both stars were shouted down. For daring to suggest it might be worthwhile to explore alternative ways to play the game, both were derided as traitors who deserved to have their tongues cut out.

I remember that well - not so much with Hull, but definitely with Lemieux.
He goes on write that without Brendan Shanahan the game might look the same as it did pre-lockout.

Even now, even after Lemieux and Hull were proven prescient in their appraisals of what ailed the sport, neither guy gets his due for it. And when you consider what it took for major changes to the NHL to actually come to pass – a season-long lockout, followed by an initiative that came not from the league, but from a player (Brendan Shanahan) – you have to wonder what the game would look like today if that conservative, shut-up-and-play mentality was permitted to prosper.
Actually, you don’t have to wonder at all. Without Shanahan’s courage, the NHL still would continue to give its greatest rewards to participants who preferred to lodge their sticks firmly in their opponents’ mid-sections and water-ski behind them up and down the ice; the league would remain a workplace in which endless cycling of the puck and the curtailing of skill mattered more than goals and those who could score them; and professional hockey would continue to fall further off the radar of the average sports fan.

I agree. Shanahan changed that attitude, and in my opinion he also saved the game.
The way I see it, it was predominately through his efforts that the lockout ended.