Can I reduce the appearance of safety netting in hockey photos?

In post processing there is a way to try. Whether the result is less obstructive or not depends on your personal viewpoint, patience, skill and luck.

What you do is get an image processing application that can take a fourier transform of an image. I use GIMP with a plugin called G'MIC (which has a huge number of functions and is a must for GIMP users IMO). This has a fourier transform feature.

In the fourier transformed image you look for bright near regular patterns of dots and replace them with a small circle filled in the average background color of the fourier image.

You'll see loads of these in an image like yours.

When you've patiently done your work on the transformed image you then apply the inverse transform.

The final image will look like the netting was partially removed.

An example is shown here :

This was a quick attempt, but as you can see, while it does reasonably well at removing the netting, it also adds it's own artifacts. Whether these are more or less obstructive than the original is your own view.

When you transform the image you'll end us with this sort of thing (note I've done some of the corrections to this to show you ). This is a crop of teh transform of your own image :