I don’t have any good ideas how to solve this ”problem” but i can share my opinion about Lite division.
I have played In Lite two seasons. At season 4 we had 30 games regular season and i really loved it. Sure that time there was only 31 team in Lite but i really felt like Lite division was competitive. At season 6 we were relegated from Pro to Lite. I got to admit that i didn’t have any interest to play in Lite because i felt that regular season wasn’t competitive enough. Regular season didn’t mean almost anything and there was too much playoffs games. Let’s crunch some numbers. If you play every regular season game and playoffs games to game sevens: You’ll play 18 regular season games and 42 playoffs games. Something has to be done to these numbers in my opinion.
I know that there is alot Lite teams which want to play really competitive games and wants to get to Pro division. But there is also teams who doesn’t want to be promoted to Pro but doesn’t want to play only normal club games.
Just an wild idea: Lite should be NHLGamers third competitive division. Cut the number of teams to ~30 and make one lower division to teams who wants to play only for fun. Lites bottom 8 will play relegation games against ”casual division” top-8 and boom. Lites regular season has meaning again and you have more games. This is just an idea so don’t judge me