Could Winter Classic be axed?

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Mike Felger joins Joe Haggerty on Sports Tonight and weighs in on the NHL's latest round of cancelled games and the chances of the Winter Classic being the next domino to fall.

Felger notes that there's a lot of financial incentive for the league to make a deal before they're faced with cancelling the Winter Classic. "The Winter Classic gate, just the ticket gate alone is so hard to pass up. It's a hundred-thousand people in Ann Harbor at 100 an average ticket. They're gonna make over 10 million that game alone. It's hard to imagine they will pee that thing away. Here's what worries me and it's worried me from the start. Maybe in the back of the owners' mind, they say 'well we'll strong-arm them until we get to the Winter Classic and then we'll make a deal. Well what if Donald Fehr and the players aren't buying that deal at that time? I don't think the players are in any sort of mood to accept anything worse than a pretty decent deal for themselves.

"I had somebody tell me a couple days ago that the players want Gary Bettman's head. They've put him in the bullseye and they want to go after him and that's kind of the end game. If that happens, and that's their goal and that's what Donald Fehr wants, either they need to back off of that, or Donald Fehr and Gary Bettman need to remove themselves from these negotiations and they need to go to the number two's and try to work something out."

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