Last year, I lived the life of a broke graduate student. I didn’t have cable (I streamed everything), and my cupboard was filled with various 2-minute or less packaged concoctions. I didn’t mind the whole not having TV thing. Mostly because I didn’t have the time, and because I was committed to only a few shows. One thing I always made time for was basketball. Sure, I didn’t have the time to catch every Raptor game or must-see matchup, but basketball games and highlights was definitely on the top of my to-watch list. One of my favourite shows to catch up on weekly highlights is court cuts, offered by The Score (now Sportsnet 360). I love my basketball highlights but court cuts is on a whole other level. Think of plays of the week on steroids. It had it all, offence, defence, milestones, and even humour, not to mention, they had their usual weekly highlights but would also do a finals edition, year end reviews, best of compilations, and player mixtapes. But since I didn’t have cable and couldn’t stream it, this was a show that I was going to have to give up for at least a year.
Well I didn’t last that long on living without court cuts so I resorted to my last option, scanning youtube for any uploaded episodes. Now the thing about the Score is that they’ve always been the younger trendy sports channel of the Toronto pack. They had more humour, younger announcers, and were actively engaged on the social media and mobile front. So it would make sense that they had an official youtube page or something to that extent. But that wasn’t the case at all. They don’t have an official page and even if you searched for court cuts on their webpage it doesn’t return any hits. Why??? This was probably one of the best segments the Score had, and for a channel that thrived on being the trendy option, this didn’t make sense at all. So what did I find? Well there are few people out there who happened to record individual episodes and then upload them on their own youtube channels. Suffice to say, I was more than happy that I could catch a few episodes here and there when I was free (seriously, I watch court cuts like a syndicated show rather than to keep up with current highlights), but I still expected more. Then I found that court cuts had a twitter account. But after perusing through their tweets I only found that they only posted links to videos that were hosted by other people. Seemed like a missed opportunity to use their great content. Now the missing piece in all of this is the idea of copyrights for their videos. Maybe it was because they could only air each episode once or something to that extent, but if that wasn’t the case, this seems like a serious misstep in an otherwise great channel.
Now with the acquisition by Rogers, I’m certain that court cuts is all but done (they haven’t tweeted anything since April), as Rogers has a new vision for the channel (more a 24/7 sports ticker and press conferences than a sports channel with a different tone). So while I was disappointed that court cuts never made it easy for me to keep up with them when I didn’t have cable, I’m even more disappointed that I may have seen the last of a great basketball segment. Guess I’ll just have to watch old episodes and reminisce about better times…
So if you’re a fan like me, or you’re just learning about court cuts, here’s my gift to you – a few of my favourite episodes.
Breakfast Surreal 