Like its auto racing counterpart, the FSWA award for top fantasy basketball writer will not see a repeat winner. It will definitely, however, go to someone from one of the industry’s most-visited sites.

The honor has been given out for the past two seasons, and neither of the two honorees — Andre’ Snellings of RotoWire and some dude you’ve probably never heard of from ESPN — shows up among this year’s finalists.

Instead, the Best Basketball Writer category comprises Steve Alexander of Rotoworld, Matt Buser of Yahoo! and Sergio Gonzalez of CBS Sports.

The FSWA awards will be announced on the first day of next week’s FSTA winter business conference in Florida.

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– His occupation as a Utah Jazz beat writer and preoccupation with fantasy basketball can meet somewhat awkwardly for Jim Burton of the (Ogden, Utah) Standard-Examiner. It does seem to have helped him connect with Jazz center Mehmet Okur, though.

– Jan Hubbard of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram tells of the long-time Larry Bird League set up to follow the Celtics great’s player rating system. Hubbard also learned that if you’re going to trade Bird in his namesake league, you should at least keep it a secret from him.

– Cal Spears has noticed some issues with ballot-stuffing on FantasyTeamNames.net and is imploring users to police themselves.

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Sports Business Daily reported that December was the best sales month in the history of the NBA Store in New York City, including the online outlet NBAStore.com. Could this mean that money awaits in the NBA fantasy market, which has been tapped into nowhere near as deeply as football and baseball?

– Before finally coming out on top in ESPN’s Gridiron Challenge, David Wegner of Alexandria, Minn., started to feel the pressure of the fight to get there.

– With the Mercedes Benz Championship teeing off the 2009 PGA season, Golfweek has added four staffers to its group of Fantasy Aces that is now seven strong.

– Rallypoint announced a deal with Samsung on Thursday, whereby it will produce a fantasy sports widget for the 2009 line of Samsung HDTV’s.

Name: Ngozika Nwaneri
Nickname: FWG Wani
Job title(s): founder and president of Amiri Business Solutions Ltd., the parent company to PASPN.net
Full-time in fantasy? Yes
Age: 29
Education: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science MIT Class of 2001
Family status: Single
Favorite fantasy sport to play and why: Fantasy football, because of the close friends and colleagues I play with each year.
Favorite sport to watch: NFL Football
Favorite team (any sport): Detroit Pistons & LIONS!
All-time favorite athlete: Isaiah Thomas
Years playing fantasy: 5 years

I got my start in the fantasy industry when: I got in contact with Jim Enright at Fanball.com when I was looking for a stats provider in order to experiment with the regular season concept of the Mock GM game. Fanball answered the call, and then later told me about the FSTA. From my first conference in February 2008 I knew there was no turning back.

Since then, my fantasy résumé includes: N/A

Three questions

1) You’re Mock GM fantasy basketball game is up for three FSTA awards this year. What makes the game new, different and intriguing when compared with what else is on the market?
What makes the Mock GM game new and intriguing is the feeling you get controlling an NBA team as if you are a real NBA GM using the rules of the collective bargaining agreement. There is a sense of ownership and accomplishment when you take over an existing NBA team and their current financial situation and turn that team into a contender. The game allows the user to live out their dreams of managing their favorite NBA team.

What changed from the 2004 origination to the 2008 relaunch?
Each year we add more pieces of the CBA to the game. The biggest change since 2004 was the addition of the regular season (real-time) portion of the game, where mock GMs play out their off-season moves in head-to-head competition with other mock GMs in an NBA-like, 18-week regular season during the NBA regular season.

2) You’ve been into programming and web design since before college. What first got you interested in that area and what were your earliest projects?
I was in a computer science program at the University of Maryland the summer before my senior year in high school, and for our final project we had to create a website. The website I created was the first version of what is today PASPN.net. You can say the project did not stop that summer of 1996 and has continued developing over the next 12 years.

3) Other than the Mock GM game, what other kinds of things fall under the PASPN.net umbrella? What, if anything, do you do on a professional level outside of running PASPN.net?
PASPN.net is an online community for all NBA fans and is a source for content and news for all things related to the NBA and fantasy basketball. Outside of running PASPN.net, I am an enterprise application architect providing consulting services to local businesses in the New York metropolitan area.