Editor's Note: This post is also a SportsNeo.com feature article. 

Now that we’re in October, it’s time for one of the 3,284 fantasy-related columns I’m going to belt out over the next seven months. Of the wide-ranging (and rapidly growing) fantasy games out there, Fantasy NBA and Fantasy Premier League are easily my favourite. Like anything else in life, if you’re not careful you can get swept away with it all.

I’ve been swept away for years. Hell, I shamelessly titled my fantasy blog “Fantasy Killed My HSC” for crying out loud. I’ll freely admit that I’ve been doing this stuff for way too long. There aren’t too many fantasy scenarios that I haven’t seen played out in leagues of my own.

I’ve been involved in leagues with smart, savvy managers who probably should’ve been employed in some capacity by the teams they support. Conversely, I’ve seen a lot of dumb stuff too: dumb signings, dumb trades, dumb managers.  And few things are more annoying than playing in a Fantasy NBA league with a bunch of nuffies! Without further ado...

The 10 Most Annoying Fantasy NBA Managers Of All Time:

(In no particular order)

1. The Trade Pimp
Also Know As: The guy who continually offers pathetic, lame, non-logical trades.
Likely Crime: Offering Raymond Felton and Boris Diaw for Chris Paul and Dwight Howard.
Managers Likely Defence: “Don’t blame me, I only make the offer...”
Likely To Share A Cell With: The guy who convinces you to attack everyone else during RISK whilst he builds his army.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Offer them equally as absurd trade offers, only do it five times a week.

There’s one (sometimes more) in every league. They’re also known as the “guys that compromise the draft” because no matter how badly they might draft they’re still a good chance to win the league because they either possess the velvet tongue, or they know which managers will bite at which things. I once participated in a league where Kobe Bryant was traded in return for Juwan Howard. I think it took me three minutes to submit my “What the!?” post in the league forum, only to realise that two other equally-incensed managers had already vented within thirty seconds of the trade going through. One of the managers even wrote an eight paragraph rant about how the real life Lakers would never be involved in such a bogus trade...

(Three years later, the Lakers cashed in Kwame Brown for Pau Gasol. Talk about bogus!)

2. The Trade Whore
Also Know As: The guy who accepts pathetic, lame, non-logical trades.
Likely Crime: Giving away LeBron James for Stephen Jackson.
Managers Likely Defence: “But I like the guys that I picked up from the trade!”
Likely To Share A Cell With: The guy serving time because his spouse convinced him that insider trading was legal.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Find out where they live, steal their car and leave a rundown push-bike in their driveway with a note that attached to the handle bars that reads “How Do You Like It?”

This person is an accomplice to the Trade Pimp. If it wasn’t for the incompetence of the Trade Whore, the Trade Pimp wouldn’t exist. They go hand in hand. They feed off each other. Rely on each other for their existence: kind of like the Matrix movies where man relies on machine just as much as machine relies on man. It’s always funny when the Trade Whore tries to make an excuse for giving away a good draft pick for something pitiful. In the aforementioned trade, the guy who ended up Juwan Howard posted a note on the league forum about three weeks after the trade with a “I didn’t realise Juwan Howard was so incredibly lame” post with the same vigour of Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”

3. The Absentee Voter
Also Know As: The guy who doesn’t turn up to the live draft.
Likely Crime: Either completely missing the draft, or turning up two picks before the end.
Managers Likely Defence: “Sorry, out with the missus” or “I just couldn’t load the app.”
Likely To Share A Cell With: The guy who forgets either his partner’s birthday, or to pay his taxes. Or both.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Hack into their account and pre-rank Tyreke Evans, James Harden and Delonte West as their first three picks to ensure they never miss the draft again.

You know when the Absentee Voter is most annoying? When he HAS pre-ranked his players and ends up taking all your sleepers because his first picks gets knocked off by other managers nice and early. Sometimes the Absentee Voter can be a help, because if they haven’t pre-ranked their players, you’re likely to be able to see five picks in advance who they’re going to get because the server’s generally just take the highest ranked players.

4. The Absentee Updater
Also Know As: The guy who turns up to the live draft...and nothing else.
Likely Crime: Doesn’t update his team or respond to trade requests.
Managers Likely Defence:  “I only turned up to make up the numbers. I don’t really care about this stuff”
Likely To Share A Cell With: The guy who walks up to the alter, gets married and then divorced all in the same week.
Best Way To Deal With Them: If they’re a legit Absentee Update, there’s not much you can do except bar them from ever participating in your league again.

For the record, a person isn’t an Absentee Updater if they play seriously for a month or two before dropping out after they realised they weren’t going to win their league. That’s just a sore loser that’s likely to be French or a West Sydney Razorbacks supporter.

5. The Double Dipper
Also Know As: The guy who secretly manages multiple teams in the one league.
Likely Crime: Trading all the best players from his different team into one uber-team.
Managers Likely Defence: “That person isn’t me! It’s not me! IT’S NOT FREAKING ME!” (“OK, fine...it’s me!)
Likely To Share A Cell With: A polygamist.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Hire a witch and have some voodoo chant cast on the culprit. If it works against Ronaldo, it’ll work against anyone. Alternately, declare 'Fantasy Jihad' on them.

If each of these people were prisoners in some sort of ‘Fantasy Prison’, the Double Dippers would be like the serial-killers locked away in the highest security part of the prison. Everyone despises them; the people who put them in there, the guards, even the inmates. They’re the worst people in the world of fantasy sports, and I’m utterly convinced there’s more of them around than we think. Although it’s hard (but doable) to ever prove who they are, the Double Dipper leaves a murky trail that no one and no league can hide.

6. The Sleep Killer
Also Know As: The guy who takes all your sleeper picks early to mid-draft.
Likely Crime: Drafting Anthony Randolph in the third round.
Managers Likely Defence: “Screw you! I liked him. I knew you were going to take him later so I went early.”
Likely To Share A Cell With: The guy who steals the attractive young girl that you’ve had on lay-by for years.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Make sure you don’t screw up your earlier picks, otherwise you prove them right.

The Sleep Killer isn’t a havoc, he’s just annoying. He takes your late picks early, forcing you do dig even deeper in the draft than you originally planned. In my main league this year, I pencilled in Rudy Gay, David Lee and Andrew Bynum as mid-round sleepers, only they were all wiped off the board by the same person nice and early – like the person look at the list of players I was targeting, or something. It was insane. It was creepy. It was annoying. And to top it all off, the Sleep Killer in this instance was my bloody brother. Ugh! 

7. The 7/11 Trash Talker
Also Know As: The guy who trash talks your team, your players and your trades.
Likely Crime: Picking you apart for adding someone from the waiver wire that he missed.
Managers Likely Defence: “I still maintain that was stupid-ass move to make!”
Likely To Share A Cell With: Charles Barkley and Chris Rock.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Drop a completely off-topic ‘mother joke’ or hang a Bill Cartwright on him.

In case you missed the reference, there is a snippet in Sam Smith’s fantastic book “The Jordan Rules” which talks about Michael Jordan’s knack of constant trash talking to and about his teammate Bill Cartwright, only to have Cartwright threaten to break Michael Jordan’s ankles if he continued to insult him. The young Jordan abided.

8. The Hitler Commissioner
Also Know As: The guy who veto’s every trade that’s pending in a league because the stats aren’t exactly identical.
Likely Crime: Blocking a LeBron James for Chris Paul trade.
Managers Likely Defence: “25.7 points per game is not fair value for 26.1 points per game. It just isn’t.”
Likely To Share A Cell With: A communist or the Soup Nazi from ‘Seinfeld’.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Unanimously vote with the rest of your league to have him removed. It works.

In 2007, I played in a league where I’m pretty sure the commissioner was Adolph Hitler in disguise. He rejected every trade (no joke, every trade!) that was put through the league except for the ones he was involved in himself. Just to see if he was paying attention, I offered him an injured Josh Smith for the then-underrated Hedo Turkoglu (a trade that I would never have done if both were healthy, of course). He bit, accepted the trade, but then took Hedo Turkoglu back off me again after realising I gave him a bum player. 

9. The Whinger
Also Know As: The guy who can’t handle losing and makes every excuse in the book for it.
Likely Crime: Complaining that certain stats should never have been included in the league.
Managers Likely Defence: “Those categories were BS! And I thought TO’s were Time Outs, not Turnovers!”
Likely To Share A Cell With: Everyone who voted for Al Gore over George W. Bush.
Best Way To Deal With Them: Send them a link to the Arnold Schwarzenegger “STOP WHINING!” YouTube video.

The Whinger is equally amusing to have around as they are annoying. They’ve got some of the best excuses in the world – mostly involving scoring categories or self-pity “I was wrongly informed” stories. Sometimes they’re actually right in what they’re saying. Others, it’s just sour grapes.

10. The 90’s Transplant
Also Know As: The guy who accepts pathetic, lame, non-logical trades.
Likely Crime: Drafting Allen Iverson, Grant Hill and Shaq in the first three rounds.
Managers Likely Defence: “Would’ve been different if I had Chris Webber. ... ... ... Oh...hang on.”
Likely To Share A Cell With: MC Hammer
Best Way To Deal With Them: Well...

...the 90’s Transplant isn’t actually a bad person to have in your league. They’ll wipe of all the junk five or six rounds too early, giving you a clear path to land all the players high on the draft board who bodies aren’t going to capitulate thirty games into the season. They’re only annoying when they take someone who deserves to go in the late round (and who you’re banking on going late, like Allen Iverson was this year), but beware that your frustrations doesn’t unconsciously turn you into The Whinger.

Hey, it happens.

Jardian Ormsby writes the Sports Neo column and authors the popular “Fantasy Killed My HSC” blog.