Having thought about this a bit, I think the suggestion to increase the goal/reduce the goalie would make ice hockey considerably less interesting to watch. It

Having thought about this a bit, I think the suggestion to increase the goal/reduce the goalie would make ice hockey considerably less interesting to watch. It goes something like this. The inherent thrill of watching a sports event comes from multiple things: pace of the game, ratio between attempts/scores, watching skillful people do tricky things, but most importantly - not knowing who is going to win. So, it's not very exciting to watch a coin tossing championship, because there's no skill involved. But at the same time, it's not very exciting to watch something where the nominally stronger team wins with near absolute certainty. Like a game with a high attempt/score ratio with a single mode of scoring. Basketball solved this by introducing another mode of scoring that's also inherently more uncertain. So they introduced asymmetry and more uncertainty leading to more interesting games, as the certainty with which you can say who's going to win is reduced, as that depends on wider skill-sets across the team and also more luck. Now, take a game with a low attempt/score ratio. The uncertainty about who's going to win is baked into that ratio. With some luck, the nominally weaker team still has a chance of winning the nominally stronger team. And this is what makes ice hockey interesting in my book. This is how Finland could win the world championships without any NHL players last year. Increasing the goal would increase the attempt/score ratio, without adding any other offsetting asymmetry to the game. This will reduce the uncertainty of who's going to win, making the game less interesting to watch. For a game with a relatively high attempt/score ratio that's also highly dynamic with a lot of attempts per game, and has somewhat similar strategies to hockey, I invite you to check out Innebandy/Floorball. It's a fun game, but not that exciting as a spectator sport. Because the nominally stronger team will win any given game with near certainty due to the large amount of attempts per game coupled with a high attempt/score ratio.