Bigger ice != more flow, more creativity, more anything good. The nice thing about the NHLers in Europe is how many of them complain about the big ice making the games less physical, more trappy and just duller overall.
Bish I don't think any, or even all, of your ideas would change the game much at all. They'd be nice mostly (except bigger ice, which I disagree with) but the changes would be cosmetic if you're looking for more offense or less defensive play. There are only a couple of realistic ways I see to use the rules to combat the dull defensive style of modern NHL teams. One is to outlaw certain defensive tactics (like in bball zone coverage and man to man or whatever they did - but in hockey it'd be very hard to do and might not work anyway). Another way might be to artificially increase scoring to the point where teams decide it might work better for them to win games by trying to score more than their opponents rather then the currently effective way of allowing the least.
The number of goals scored is irrelavant really as long as the style is exciting to fans, but teams won't play fast attacking hockey unless they think that's going to give them the best chance to win. If goals in general are hard to come by, then attention to defense will win you games but if scoring is up significantly then you can't assume that a trap will give you enough offense to win so you have to attack a little more. The most exciting games you'll see are the high school level, mainly because the kids are good sized and pretty skilled yet dumb as stumps and won't play team D if you put a gun to their heads. You just don't get that in the pros, so maybe making the nets bigger and artificially increasing the number of goals that way would help force teams open it up, I'm not talking 13-7 games but if teams were averaging about 5 goals per game then I think the actual style of hockey would change back to what we had in the late 80's.
And it would piss off goalies, which I like. God I hate those fuckers.
