As per Puck Daddy, TSN, CBC, Lou Korac, et al, the Winter Classic is cancelled. They might as well save us the trouble and cancel the season, maybe even fold the league.

At this point the NHL's Board of Governors can go fuck themselves. They're not just shooting themselves in the foot by cancelling the game, they're also shooting up their leg by doing the same "Mind if we hold your ticket money for you?" bullshit that is being done to season ticket holders. The money lost by the sponsors is stupefying, and two of the biggest sponsors just happen to have naming rights and ownership of two Central Division teams.

If I was the owner of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, I'd have Bettman's, Daly's, Snider's and Jacobs' nuts in a vise over this. Almost all of the Enterprise ads I see are during hockey season, to the point of illness. The owner of Enterprise also has a major stake in the Blues' ownership along with Tom Stillman. (This, coincidentally, is why I don't think that Elliotte Friedman's 30 Thoughts column is completely accurate when he said that St. Louis was one of the teams supporting the lockout most strongly. St. Louis' owners would be losing more money in ads than they'll save in salary & operations by taking a hard line on the lockout.) As for the Winter Classic's main sponsor, Bridgestone? Well, they have a stake in the Predators' well-being, since it's the Bridgestone Arena that gets packed with those bright yellow jerseys. There is going to be a lot of advertising money lost due to this lockout. That the sponsors who have ownership shares in teams aren't taking it out of the other owners' hides is beyond me.

Then again, I don't run a multi-billion dollar business like Enterprise, so maybe it makes sense according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles on a larger scale.