My theory is that if the NHL cuts some numbers of games from 82 to 72-76 games, it would result in a fewer games but more fans would attend games to fill some seats to make TV look good. With the numbers, if you have about 100,000 fan base in a market, and only 20% of them can afford to attend 5 games a year, another 30% can afford to attend 3 games a year while 50% of fan bases can afford to attend a game a year. And rest of the fanbase could only afford to attend a game once every 2 or 3 years. So if those games are spread out, the number of seats would look bad so if you reduce the games, and you have this number of fan bases budget for the year, with reduced games, you'd see more seats naturally would fill up slightly and the TV would look a lot better with more fans in the arena.
The same goes for baseball, if they went from 162 games to 154 games, you'd have some extra fans attending a game and the capacity percent would increase to make stats look good and it also would help with payroll expense with the owners reducing their salary. The attendance of those hockey games in southern markets would increase slightly. You have a season ticket base, and a walk-up crowd and attendance would increase. It would also help the season to end earlier to late May rather than June. I would love to see percent of the games in a whole year is a sellout all over the NHL stats, not counting teams buying up a remaining tickets to make it a sellout.