I wasn't talking about if the players would cross or not - I was talking about the fan support.
I highly, highly doubt that, over all, there would be more people that showed up to an NHL replacement game than an NFL replacement game. Consider proportions. 70,000 people show up to an Oakland Raiders game on average. During the NFL strike, 7,000 people show. That's 10%. Apply that to most hockey arenas and you get a crowd of 1,800. Heck, let's make it 20% for a crowd of 3,600. That's still only half the crowd of 7,000 the Raiders were drawing. And in some cities (Phoenix, Carolina, Chicago), it'd be less while in most Canadian cities, it'd be more. But my guess is the average would be about 20% capacity.
Now lets take your argument of "losses would be smaller." Average ticket price $40 with a crowd of 3,600 as establised above. That's $144,000 revenue a game or $11,808,000 a season. Now, even with a payroll of $1,000,000 a team ($43,478.26 for 23 players, which I believe is right at the AHL minimum), you have $10,808,000 to cover all costs, including travel, arena opening/closing, auxilliary personal, equiptment, medical costs, insurance and salaried front office.
My suspiscion is two-fold. One, if you're going to bring in quality replacements (from the AHLs, CHLs, ECHLs, Senior Hockey in Canada, UHLs), you'll have to pay them more than $43,000 a season, especially if you think about insurance and drawing players that would make your fans come. And the rest of your expenses would add up to well over $10,000,000 a year.
So if your argument is that "they would lose more by playing under the old CBA," in some cases yes (the Leafs might disagree), but they would definitely operate at a loss. And convincing teams like the Leafs or Stars who generally operate at a fairly significant profit level (the Stars lost $300,000 last year, mostly due to a fall out with the fans over ticket prices which lead to them losing their sell out streak and playing to about 98% capacity on the season) to operate at a loss "for the good of the league" will be a harder sell than you think.