NBA fans are a little mystified.
Andrew Wiggins is having a great season — 18.1 ppg, 4.2 rpg, 41.2 percent from distance — but nothing that would suggest he should be the All-Star Game STARTER from the Golden State Warriors.
So … how did it happen?
Well, let’s remember that 50 percent of the weight on voting came from fans, with 25 percent from a media panel and 25 percent from players voting.
And there was one tweet that may have given Wiggins a TON of votes. It came from BamBam, a K-Pop sensation who is in the group GOT7.
Check out the numbers on this tweet from BamBam on January 7:
It’s the best time to begin 2022! He is one of the best two-way players!
Wiggs deserves to be an All-Star, vote Andrew Wiggins into the 2022 NBA All-Star Game..and I can’t wait to meet you all very soon#AndrewWiggins #NBAAllStar pic.twitter.com/bpOXKAJ920— BamBam🦢 (@BamBam1A) January 8, 2022
Nearly 37,000 retweet, 68.4 thousand likes and over 3,000 quote tweets. He has nearly 10 million followers!
The Athletic looked into this and Anthony Slater had this to report:
Included as a small part of the Warriors’ vast business outreach the past year, they entered into a partnership with BamBam, a Thai singer based in South Korea who is a megastar within the K-pop world and also happens to be a fan of Steph Curry and, by basketball relation, the Warriors. …
Go back to Jan. 7. The Warriors’ social media team strategically selected that day for BamBam’s Wiggins-hashtagged All-Star post. It was a “2-for-1” sale. Votes counted as double. BamBam’s message, embedded below and sent to his 9.6 million followers, erupted in the active K-pop world, becoming Thailand’s No. 1 trending topic and generating enough buzz to boost Wiggins across the finish line as the third-leading vote-getter in the West frontcourt.
As Slater notes, that may not have been the ONLY reason why Wiggins will start. Draymond Green is hurt and he notes “Rudy Gobert and his clearly unpopularity.”
Still, that tweet may have done some heavy lifting. Amazing.
