A different sport for two minutes
Hockey is a game of shifts, structure and puck movement, and a shootout is a sequence of individual attempts that resemble almost nothing else in it. As spectacle it works — a clean, tense, easily understood ending. As a way of determining which team was better, it is close to arbitrary.
I do not think that is a scandal. Every sport that refuses to play forever needs a tiebreaker, and all of them are compromises. It is just worth being honest that the compromise is large here.
The standings carry the consequence
The awkward part is not the evening; it is the table. When a game decided this way distributes points differently from one decided in regulation, the entire season's ranking is shaped by a tiebreaker that measures something the sport otherwise rarely asks for.
That is why fiddling with overtime — fewer skaters, more open ice, longer periods — has been the more productive reform. Anything that ends more games with actual hockey reduces how often the tiebreaker has to do work it is not suited to.
Why I would keep it anyway
The alternatives are worse in their own ways. Ties satisfy nobody in a league whose audience expects a result; unlimited overtime is unworkable across a long calendar with travel. Given those constraints, an entertaining arbitrary ending beats an unentertaining one.
But the argument should stay alive. A sport that keeps questioning its own tiebreaker is a sport paying attention, and the version of overtime played today exists because people would not let the question go. Arena's NHL standings guide explains how the points actually work.
What a better tiebreaker would need
Any replacement has to satisfy three things at once: it must end reliably within a sensible time, it must reward something the sport actually values, and it must be legible to a casual viewer within seconds. The shootout scores well on the first and third and badly on the second, which is exactly why the argument centres on fairness rather than practicality.
Extended small-sided overtime is the closest anyone has come to satisfying all three, because it is still hockey and it still finishes. If I were designing the ending from scratch I would push further in that direction and keep the shootout only as a final backstop — visible rarely enough to remain a novelty rather than a routine way of settling the table.