First cut down on the obstruction and call the rulebook, then tinker with the goalie pads to allow some extra shooting room and skater pads to cut down on rock hard elbows and shoulders.
I think that the slide back towards dead-puck-era style officiating is actually an intentional move by the league in an attempt to reduce injuries.
Think about the kinds of things people mention when they talk about concussions, for example. They talk about the speed of the game. They talk about how modern players are so much faster and bigger than in previous eras (on average), that even clean hits can do a lot of damage. There are, of course, tons of other factors - changes in the way players deal with each other, equipment changes, and of course new diagnostic techniques and so forth that allow us to see how many concussions are actually happening - but the size/speed issue is a big part of it, and the league knows this. Cracking down on headhunting helps, but F = ma is an immutable law of the universe; dirty hits are only a small subset of hits resulting in concussions, and if you can't directly address the average mass of players to reduce the damage that average hits can do, you have to address acceleration.
If we accept that, and if we look at how obstruction has returned in force around the same time that the league has taken steps to address head injuries, then assuming it's intentional isn't a big leap. Setting picks, hooks and holds, tying someone up along the boards for a little longer than usual, old-fashioned water skiing - all of these slow the game down, reduce the ability of players to operate at or near top speed as often. In turn, it theoretically reduces the incidence of hits that cause concussions and head injuries, because the average hit will have less acceleration in your F = ma equation. Especially at a time when the NHL is under extreme pressure to show it is reducing head injuries due to potential legal consequences, obstruction is - to the league - by far the lesser of the two evils.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that one way or another obstruction is here to stay, rightly or wrongly. And it's quite possible the league is
right, that this might well be the most effective way of reducing head injuries in the long run, even if the league can't come out and explicitly say that it's deliberately not enforcing the rules for that purpose.
If that's the case, proposals to increase offense will
have to focus on things like net size, goalie equipment size, and other factors first, because addressing obstruction might end up being off the table.
