NHL Scoring Troubles

It seems everyone is talking about how scoring is back down, and they can increase it in the NHL. There have been talks of increasing the net size, to the latest creating a key in front of the net that only 1 defenseman can be in at a time (They stole my idea of having a deadzone in front of the net where anything goes! those bastards):

Globe and Mail story

I think everyone is missing the real reason why scoring is down. If you look at when scoring started to decrease it happened at the start of the 90′s and slowly got worse as time went on. What other major even happened in the early 90′s? Well the NHL decided it would expand and grow the league. By doing so it lessoned the talent pool in the NHL. As the league expanded to a full 30 teams it meant that it was a lot harder to find talented players, and as such most teams were left with a top 1 maybe 2 lines, with the remaining two lines being set as checking, or shutdown lines. What this did was force the coaches to abandon the run and gun style strategies and move to a defensive trap system because they just didn’t have the talent to play the other style.

To me the answer to the scoring problems is easy, religation. If you removed 6 teams from the NHL you would create an influx of 120+ NHL caliber players. Or roughly 4 to 5 new players per team. With more talent on every team in the NHL it would only make sense that more goals would be scored, as well it would create an even more competitive league.

The league can change the rules, make nets bigger, setup keys in front of the net, but when it comes down to it, if a team isn’t very talented, the coach will find a way to play an overly defensive system to compensate, and try to hold the number of goals against to a minimum.

What do you all think?