Basketball is a great sport, it's true, but my favorite sport of all is politics. And tomorrow is the once-every-four-years, Olympic Gold Medal game.

Unlike other sports where people might be playing for a trophy or some rings, in this case the winning team gets to run the country and literally dominate the world. For several years. Big stakes make for big excitement. Sure, there's a lot of boring speeches and annoying advertisements, but that stuff's over now, and we can just watch the final contest and see who wins and by how many points.

And just in case you think this has no connection to baskeball, consider these choice nuggets:

• Sarah Palin and Barack Obama both played on their high school baskeball teams. It's been reported that Obama plays some hoops every time he has a major debate or election day, to calm his nerves and bring good luck. He could be dunking on someone's head as you read this.
• This is a great basketball blog, and there are a lot of great political blogs. The premier polling analyst got started crunching stats for baseball. And the godfather of liberal political blogs is also one of the founders of SB Nation, host of BlazersEdge.
• Obama's brother-in-law is the new basketball coach of our very own Oregon State Beavers (boo, go Ducks).

I'm sure there are lots of other interesting connections, but there's a few.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I thought it would be fun to see how the opinions of BEdgers compare to those of the general population, so take the poll. I'm pretty sure I have enough options to cover everybody.

Please keep any discussion civil and positive, unless it is directed toward me.

UPDATE: Poll Analysis

Wow, looks like Blazer fans love them some Obama. He's currently ahead 64-17. If you throw out the other choices, Obama is up 79-21. That compares to the national vote which will probably be something like 53-45, with 2% to third parties. I'll take a stab at some reasons why Obama would outperform here.

1. Oregon, and especially Portland, trends liberal. Oregon will probably vote something like 57-41 Obama. But that's nothing like the 79% from BlazersEdge.
2. Basketball fans are more likely to be black. I have no idea if that's true, but it's a thought. African Americans are voting Obama at something like 95%.
3. Blog readers tend to be young. I don't know the demographics here, but I would guess they trend younger than the general population by a bit. Young people support Obama by a wide margin.
4. "Get this politics junk out of my basketball site" voters trend Republican. Just a guess, but it makes sense. Since the people on this site trend liberal, the conservatives may be more hostile to political discussion here.
5. Enthusiasm gap. McCain supporters are feeling demoralized right now, and thus are less likely to click on this FanPost or vote in the poll. Obama voters are excited, and want to vote everywhere they can.

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Kevin Pritchard has done it again. For weeks he has been leaking that the Blazers are in love with Westbrook, Augustin, and Alexander. Consequently, those guys shoot up the draft chart, as all the other GMs try to outsmart KP. Meanwhile, KP is secretly in love with Bayless but says NOTHING about it to anyone. Other GMs don't hear any talk about Bayless out of genious Pritchard....so they let him drop lower and lower in the draft. They KP swoops in and picks him up.

Remember, this guy was a consenus #4 just a week ago. And now we get him (apparently) for just 13 and Jack. Who would have imagined? Pritchard has done it again, and he did it by manipulating everyone, playing off of his reputation to change the order of draft and get who he wanted all along. Simply amazing.

Update: Ike Diogu too? Even better.

A lot of people seem to think that Roy would be (or is) a great point guard on offense, but cannot handle the role of point guard on defense. At the same time, or team seems to missing one key player, that being a starter alongside Roy at guard.

So, my general NBA knowledge being a bit limited, is there a player out there that is the opposite of Roy? That is, a player who is a great point guard defender, but not a good shooting guard defender, and at the the same time has the offensive skills of a shooting guard, but not the skills of a point guard?

I would guess that such a player might have a hard time fitting in most places, since you usually want a player who is good at the same position on offense or defense, so the perfect player for Portland might even come cheap. But I have no idea who it would be. Any ideas?

Quoting KP in Casey's ongoing chat with him, in regards to Ime:

"We will miss him."

He talked about why they preferred Outlaw, and that Ime was asking too much money for them (significantly MORE than they payed Travis). Together with a full roster, that sounds final.

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