Fresh off of winning the NBA championship, coach Steve Kerr wanted to set the tone for his Golden State Warriors for what's sure to be an arduous title defense with this upcoming 2015-16 season.
So, what was his way of doing that? By making the first film session of the year a surprise viewing of Game of Zones, an animated short produced by Bleacher Report and essentially turning NBA players into animated-spinoff characters of HBO's Game of Thrones — except this version was with all Warriors.
Since Kerr worked as a TNT analyst for eight years, he dialed up his old Turner Sports contacts this past summer to gauge whether building an animated clip catered to the Warriors was possible. Once he got the green light, he fed the Bleacher Report developers with inside team jokes from the Warriors' locker room. Turner owns Bleacher Report.
"Normally, we have the luxury of choosing any scene from Game of Thrones and any player or storyline from the NBA," Adam Malamut, who worked on the series, told Bleacher Report. "In this made-to-order case, we weren't sure how familiar our small audience [Warriors players/coaches] was with Game of Thrones, and we were limited to using only the Warriors roster. We decided not to focus on show references, but instead on making the Warriors players laugh."
The best part of the surprise was that Bleacher Report cameras were on hand, when Kerr surprised the Warriors with the animated video, which predictably generated plenty of laughs amongst the players. See for yourself.
Who did they portray best?
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