For those of you holding your breath in anticipation of a championship duel between King James and Kobe, you better start breathing.

The NBA playoffs are so long and drawn out that newspapers may not even be around to cover the final.

But don't worry sports fans, there's another star-studded showdown to tune into that you don't have to wait for.

The NHL's top two players, Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, meet in round two of the playoffs for what promises to be a good old fashioned backyard brawl. I'm more excited than a 7-year-old at Sesame Street On Ice.

"Looks like we're playing Pittsburgh," Washington coach Bruce Boudreau said after his team's game seven victory over the Rangers. "Welcome to the circus. It's going to be great for hockey and great for TV too."

The wonderful thing about a hockey playoff series is that it allows ample time for the opposing players to develop searing hatred of one another.

While this is probably true in other sports as well, no other arena provides the opportunity to do something with that hatred quite like hockey.

Sure you'll have a flagrant foul here and a plunked batter there on the diamond and hard court, but in hockey, you get fistfights.

We're not talking clear-the-bench-and-yell-at-each-other fights like you see in baseball. We're talking one-on-one, hard-hits-to-the-head-till-someone-hits-the-ice fistfights.

But that's just the beginning. With the Capitals/Penguins match-up there is already a laundry list of history from the regular season.

"There's more to stars meeting here, great hockey players meeting, there's great personalities, strong personalities, there's faces of the league that are clashing," Penguins coach Dan Bylsma said Wednesday.

"Clashing" seems to be about right.

Alex Semin, Washington's "other Alex" who leads the league in

playoff goals this year, said earlier that Sid the Kid is just another overrated product of the NHL's hype machine.

His team also accuses the wonder kid of complaining to the refs too much. Bulletin-board material: check.

During their Feb. 22 meeting in Washington, Crosby and Ovechkin engaged in a shoving match, all the while yapping their jaws off at each other. Possessive and jealous stars marking their territory: check.

In all four regular-season games, Ovi also targeted Pittsburgh's MVP candidate, Evgeni Malkin, lining him up for several teeth-rattling hits.

Crosby later accused the league's top goal scorer of singling out his teammate on the ice. History of bad blood: check.

While this series certainly fills all three rings of the circus, it doesn't need to do so. There are already enough storylines with the team matchup alone that even fired Tampa Bay Lightning coach Barry Melrose can come up with enough intelligent-sounding original material to fill a whole ESPN segment.

All under one roof, NHL fans can watch the league's last two MVPs and last three scoring champions square off for up to two full weeks. Malkin and Ovechkin are dueling for this year's MVP award while the presence of Crosby and Semin make this a battle of the top two duos around.

If that doesn't whet your appetite, just know that this series has already been pitched as a showdown between the two best players in the world. Why settle for one ringmaster when you can have two?

So while you decide between watching either paint dry or the NBA playoffs, consider flipping over to Versus (and/or NBC) to catch a sport that doesn't need refs to ensure high drama matchups.

It may take a few extra seconds of searching your TV guide to actually figure out which channel Versus is on, but I guarantee it will be worth it.