“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.