Adam and Craig Malamut have created the funniest sports show on the internet, yet they can’t explain why it is funny.
The amount of little detail BR puts into these is comparable to how much D&D put into the real life game of thrones. My all time favorite subtly is the “Agholor can’t catch” line at the end of the Process episode.
“I feel like we’ve just sort of intuited,” says Craig, 28, the younger brother by seven years.
His older brother adds: “A lot of times we don’t even think about, like, what makes something funny. We are just trying to make something interesting.”
Finally, they settle on one possible answer: “One thing we always try to do,” says Craig, “is take something that is really stupid and do it as seriously as possible.”
To illustrate this, they describe a scene they’ve written for their animated show, “Game of Zones,” that they ended up scrapping when the Boston Celtics failed to make the N.B.A. finals.
Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ coach, is giving an epic battle speech to his team, evoking the Battle of the Bastards in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” The shot cuts to the Golden State Warriors, whose coach, Steve Kerr, is giving a similarly impassioned speech — but about the logistics of a victory parade.
“‘Men, ask yourselves this one question? Do any of you have any dietary restrictions?’” Adam Malamut excitedly recites in the fake English accent that permeates the show. “And JaVale McGee is, like, ‘I am vegan!’”
If you’re a bit confused, well, none of this makes very much sense. “Game of Zones” is an animated show about the N.B.A. with two- to four-minute episodes, in a medieval setting. In the four years since it was created, it has become a phenomenon, beloved equally by fans and the N.B.A. players it parodies. Kerr and Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey have both requested special episodes, and players including Joel Embiid, C. J. McCollum and Lonzo Ball have tweeted their approval.
It is, seemingly, a show with a narrow audience, requiring extensive knowledge of both “Game of Thrones” and the N.B.A. for full understanding and enjoyment. But Rory Brown, the president of Bleacher Report, where the Malamuts are employees, doesn’t see it that way.
“What looks like a pretty slim middle of the Venn diagram gets a lot bigger really fast,” he said, “because it celebrates all the things about the N.B.A. that I love as a fan, but it is doing it in a completely different way.”
Adam Malamut was a freelance animator five years ago, making a show for Yahoo called “Sports Friends” in which some proto-”Game of Zones” material can be seen. A Bleacher Report executive encouraged him to pitch an idea, and with “Game of Thrones” becoming a cultural powerhouse, Malamut suggested an animated show that combined the N.F.L. with “Game of Thrones.”
“Football has a feel like armies; you get these 53-man rosters,” Malamut said. “And they actually have helmets.” He was steered instead toward the N.B.A., a better fit for a humorous cartoon.
“The culture of the sport is just so fun,” Craig Malamut added. “Everyone knows the personalities, and everyone knows the drama so much more.”
While the first episode, released during the 2014 playoffs, was sprinkled with humor, the joke was mostly a single note: Wouldn’t it be funny if we pretended basketball teams and players were like the houses and characters from “Game of Thrones?” The Miami Heat, then, were conceived of as the Lannisters and the San Antonio Spurs were the White Walkers.
The first episode — written, voiced and animated almost entirely by the brothers — was a hit, and persuaded Bleacher Report to invest in the show. That video has been watched almost seven million times on YouTube, and the brothers produced seven more episodes over the next two years.
The real breakthrough came in planning the fourth season, which ran in the spring of 2017. Bleacher Report hired a team of 10 animators (now 15), allowing the Malamuts to create an eight-episode season. From 2014 to 2016 there had been eight episodes total.
It also led to a crucial change in “Game of Zones”; it isn’t really about “Game of Thrones” anymore. The Malamuts knew that “Game of Thrones” would eventually end, and also that it was prudent not to remain tied to a show notorious for its plot twists and its characters dying at an alarming rate.
Now the show “has the feel and tone of ‘Game of Thrones,’ but it is not actually pulling from the show,” Adam said.
Shedding the need to remain faithful to “Game of Thrones,” the show became a more densely packed menagerie of clever N.B.A. jokes and references, often requiring a second or third viewing to fully digest.
From the beginning, “Game of Zones” has thrived in a realm of the internet typically referred to as N.B.A. Twitter, which also includes basketball message boards on Reddit, YouTube highlight reels and comment sections, Instagrammers and memes. The show draws ideas and humor from that culture, and in turn is the show most representative of it.
The Malamuts are bombarded with requests for specific plot lines, and whenever something crazy happens in the N.B.A. — usually off the court — fans tweet and email to ask when it will be turned into an episode. Perhaps counter-intuitively, their response is to wait.
“We will never beat the hive mind of the internet when it comes to making jokes about what just happened with J. R. Smith last night,” said Craig, referring both to Smith’s shocking error in the first game of the N.B.A. finals last Thursday as well as to his general J. R. Smith-ness.
Instead, planning for the past two seasons of the show has begun around the New Year, and eight episodes have come out near the end of the N.B.A. season and during the playoffs, acting as a sort of recap.
The Malamuts are natives of Cherry Hill, N.J., and widely known as Philadelphia 76ers fans. After a report by The Ringer last week that caused the 76ers to investigate General Manager Bryan Colangelo’s Twitter use — an investigation that found Colangelo’s wife had defended him with three anonymous accounts, and ultimately led to his resignation — the Malamuts were bombarded with messages.
“That was like the bat signal for ‘Game of Zones,’” Adam said.
But it wasn’t so easy. Because it was, and still is, an active story, the brothers worried that further revelations would render their interpretation wrong, or worse, unfunny. Bleacher Report’s animators were already producing a full season, and any additional scenes or episodes involving Colangelo and the 76ers would have to be written, voiced and animated on top of everybody’s regular work.
It is also too obvious. The humor in the wife of a general manager using an anonymous Twitter account to defend the size of his shirt collars is bare for all to see. “If somebody else can think of it,” said Adam, describing their motto, “we can think of something better.”
Halfway into a checklist to complete the final episode, which had its debut on Thursday, the Malamuts aren’t quite sure where “Game of Zones” goes from here. They don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that getting a show on television is the be-all and end-all, and they have some wild ideas about what they will be doing at this time next year.
“Fully immersed in the VR world that is ‘Game of Zones 3D,’ ” Adam Malamut said. “I don’t want to give any secret plans, but it could be fun to do a Skyrim game with. …”
“An RPG,” interjects Craig. “You’re a basketball player that also has to fight people with swords.”
They say all of this while laughing, and it isn’t clear whether they are kidding or not. A role-playing game starring N.B.A. players fighting with swords sounds absurd. It sounds like a sure failure.
Then again, so did “Game of Zones.”