Zaza Pachulia is no NBA All-Star — but he almost landed a starting spot when lineups were announced Thursday. John Scott is no NHL All-Star — hell, he's not even in the NHL anymore. But he'll be captaining an All-Star squad for the league on Jan. 31.

Pachulia and Scott play different sports, of course, and as far as we know have little else in common. But here's what they do share: Both became major All-Star factors in their respective sports because of hijacked fan voting processes. Scott was voted into the NHL game out of sheer irony (he's a journeyman who lacks an All-Star's skill), while Pachulia made his surge thanks to a Vine star's promise to follow back.

What a time, as they say, to be alive.

Let's start with Pachulia, who was 14,000 votes away from being named an All-Star starter when lineups were announced Thursday. NBA fans decide starting lineups; reserves are selected by league coaches. He's a good player, to be sure, averaging 10 points and 10 rebounds per game for the Mavericks this season. But when the league released an update on All-Star voting last Thursday, he was about where he belonged in voting — eighth among Western Conference front-court players, and nowhere near the starting lineup.

Fast forward just one week, and Pachulia had made up astonishing ground. He finished in fourth place — one spot away from being a starter and ahead of much better players and bigger names. In fact, if Kobe Bryant, playing out the final season of his legendary career, had been categorized as a backcourt player instead of a front-court player, Pachulia would have been voted into the lineup.

So what happened in one week's time? The day after that progress report was released — with Pachulia in eighth place — the Vine star Hayes Grier posted three tweets. Here's the first.

Let's help @BeraOfficial get @zaza27 in the All Star game #NBAVOTE Zaza Pachulia U can vote once a day! Tweet me a screenshot for a follow! — Hayes Grier (@HayesGrier) January 15, 2016

The @BeraOfficial mentioned there is Bera Ivanishvili, a pop star from Georgia (the country not the state). That's also where Pachulia is from. So, the implication — or at least or best guess at the origins of this bizarre connection — is that Bera is a mutual friend of both Pachulia and Grier. Anyway, here's more from Grier a week ago.

Tweet the hashtag #NBAVOTE with "Zaza Pachulia" and I'll be liking and following you and your tweets!! @beraofficial — Hayes Grier (@HayesGrier) January 15, 2016

Grier is a teen idol of the social media age (though not as famous as brother Nash Grier). He has 3 million Twitter followers, many of them teens who constantly tweet at him to ask for attention or express their devotion.

Fan votes for the NBA All-Star game on social media counted toward a player's total. It is unlikely there is a tremendous amount of overlap between his fans and NBA fans, yet #NBAVOTEZAZA trended multiple times on Twitter after Grier put out his call, but that's of little matter in the final analysis.

That's not to say Pachulia didn't deserve any votes, or that all the votes he did receive were phony. But do you know what happens when a Vine celebrity mobilizes an army of more than three million digitally addicted teens to propel a role player into the NBA All-Star game? Zaza Pachulia damn near makes the NBA All-Star game.

The curious case of John Scott

Scott, left, is arguably more boxer than hockey player. Image: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

Now let's look at Scott, the player unexpectedly voted into the NHL All-Star game. He's a 33-year-old journey man whose main job is to fight other players — not your typical All-Star.

That's exactly why cheeky NHL fans decided to mount a campaign to get him into the All-Star Game via online voting. Not long after voting opened up, you could find the hashtag #VoteJohnScott floating around hockey Twitter.

Irony is the native language of the social Internet and, lo and behold, the John Scott campaign actually gained so much momentum that he was voted into the game. Making it all even stranger is that Scott was traded from the Phoenix Coyotes to the Montreal Canadiens after voting had closed. The Canadiens immediately demoted him to a minor league affiliate (Scott's not actually that good, remember).

The upshot is that a player with no business being in the All-Star game, and a player not even in the NHL, will captain an All-Star team at the end of the month.

Said Scott to The New York Times this week: “I’m going to the All-Star Game. I’m going to play with the best players in the world, and it’s going to be sweet.”

Good, bad or in between

Fan voting has long been a part of the All-Star selection process in many sports — for good reason. And, as long as there has been fan voting, some fans have cast cheeky votes. All in good fun! But with Pachulia and Scott, we have something different.

Within the same month, a player made the NHL All-Star game because of an inside joke, and another came thisclose to making the NBA All-Star game because a social media celebrity promised millions of teen girls follows and likes.

Is this bad? Is this good? We'll let you decide — but what's not up for debate is that it's a wholly modern phenomenon that's quite strange to behold.