The Cavs and Lakers finished one-two in the league standings. James is the favourite to win this year's regular-season MVP; Bryant won it last year. One of each has been a finalist in the past two NBA finals, when the San Antonio Spurs and Boston Celtics won respective titles. And knowing that the Spurs and Celtics are depleted by injuries to respective mainstays Manu Ginobili and Kevin Garnett - knowing that a raft of sub-contenders, among them Orlando and Denver and Portland and Houston, have their faults - Cavs-Lakers seems a given.

It means David Stern, the NBA commissioner, couldn't ask for a better ratings draw. And it means courtside stats crews should probably think about investing in surgical masks. James's coming run means his game-time sideline dispersal of a giant palm full of Cramer Rosin Mixture, the age-old hand-drying powder that King James has turned into an essential prop in his elaborate pre-tip routine. James's ritualistic tossing of the substance is theatrical enough to have been made into a TV commercial and cool enough to have been mimed by the Pittsburgh Steelers' Santonio Holmes in the wake of Holmes's Super Bowl-winning touchdown.

(Cramer Rosin Mixture is also enough of a respiratory irritant that the folks at Cramer Products, a 55-employee operation in Gardner, Kan., where they've been making training-room rosin and other training room staples from eye-black to ankle braces for most of the past century, don't recommend the skyward projection of its tiny particles for the same reason that baby powder is no longer recommended for use on babies.)

"It's intended for use on the hands," said Ed Christman, Cramer's VP of marketing. "That said, we appreciate LeBron using our product."

The defending-champion Celtics probably saw their title hopes go up in smoke this week, when Boston coach Doc Rivers announced that defensive anchor Kevin Garnett might well miss the playoffs with an unspecified knee injury. So it's hard to imagine the Celtics, who at full strength a year ago needed Game 7 escape acts against Atlanta and Cleveland to get out of the first two rounds before trouncing the Lakers in a six-game final, finding their way past James et al, let alone past the Magic in the second round.

Orlando, mind you, is scarily reliant on jump shots, and gets hurt by stalwart Dwight Howard's inability to make free throws. Denver, a fashionable pick as Western finalists, doesn't match up well against the Lakers. And Portland and Houston, emergent and menacing, lack experience.

The Cavs and Lakers, meanwhile, have been hardened by disappointment, and both teams are much improved. James's Cavaliers, swept in the 2007 crowning of the Spurs and second-round losers last year, for the first time seem to count among them a perimeter sidekick, Mo Williams, who figures to make timely plays. And Bryant's Lakers, who breezed through the West a year ago without 7-footer Andrew Bynum, have Bynum alongside Spanish tree Pau Gasol.

The Lakers get this corner's endorsement as impending champs, and they're paying me as much as the folks at Cramer are paying James.

"We don't have to tell somebody LeBron's using our rosin because we pay him," said Christman. "The good news for us is, he's using it out of choice. It gives us credibility. The reason LeBron is using it is because it works."