from Scott Burnside of ESPN,

The players are busy playing all over the world and attacking commissioner Gary Bettman on Twitter, as are the owners with trying to set up secret chats with the players and spending all of 10 minutes going over the players' latest proposals. So maybe it has escaped both sides that outside their tidy little bubble the give-a-hoot factor about not just the labor talks, but the game itself, is rapidly diminishing.

Pffttt. Gone.

Between the multiple events set for Comerica Park and downtown Detroit and the Winter Classic itself set for The Big House in Ann Arbor, some 260,000 tickets were expected to be distributed to events. That doesn't count the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, who might have just descended on the area to be part of the atmosphere.

As the buzz surrounding the first Winter Classic involving a Canadian team and the wildly popular alumni events goes mute, as the expected record television audience reaches for the remote to switch to other programming, as the revenues -- expected to top the previous five Winter Classics and the two Canadian Heritage Classics -- vanish, the implication will be clear to anyone still paying attention: Both sides in this ludicrous dispute are royally screwed.

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