One day in 2022, an account manager from the Bay Area nicknamed jordy was bored at work. So, like any 9-to-5er in need of a brain break, he reached for his phone and started scrolling on Twitter (now known as X). The algorithm quickly fed him a clip of sports highlights set to music.
Jordy gawked at his screen.
He always believed that certain songs fit certain players—their style of play, their aesthetic, their swag. For instance, the 1982 club classic “Mama Used to Say” by the British R&B singer Jordan reminded him of his basketball idol, Stephen Curry.
The post sparked an idea: What if he edited highlights of Curry to the track, a favorite of gamers since its placement on the NBA 2K15 soundtrack.
For years, jordy dreamed of transitioning from account management to sports content creator. This was his shot at making it happen. He opened Final Cut Pro on his laptop and got to work. As a final touch, he added his name to the end of the clip with a free font he found on the internet to trademark it. He posted the Steph Curry video on TikTok. Within a week, three of his videos had surpassed one million views.
“That’s what made me realize that I might have something here,” jordy says. “The rest is kind of history.”
Four years later, the Hercules, California native has amassed over 690,000 followers on TikTok and collaborated with Adidas, Gatorade, and StubHub.
He's just one of thousands of creators reshaping the way a generation consumes sports.
The NBA is a “Highlights-Based Sport”
The NBA is thriving in a way that it hasn’t for decades. For all the talk of soft caps and hard aprons, there is relative labor peace—the current CBA expires in 2030. The 2025-26 season was the first one under the NBA’s new media rights deals, which will pump $76 billion into the league over the next 11 years. There was the emergence of new superstars, new villains, and the season ended with a traditionally hapless franchise, who just so happen to play in the world’s biggest market, win their first championship in 53 years. Needless to say, ratings were huge.
The 2026 NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs averaged 20.6 million viewers on ABC and ESPN, making it the most watched finals since Michael Jordan’s Last Dance in 1998. That’s more than the Kobe-Shaq Lakers and the Heatles garnered. That’s even more eyeballs than LeBron’s historic 2016 comeback against Curry’s Warriors.
The NBA is on fire. But while the league spends tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars on marketing and advertising to boost consumer engagement, a small army of content creators on TikTok armed with nothing more than cheap editing software and a love of the NBA are doing a better job of promoting the game than the middle-management suits at NBA Corporate Headquarters at 645 Fifth Avenue.
Edits posted by creators routinely outperform content from official league accounts in both reach and engagement. On January 21, 2026, the NBA posted 20 videos to its official TikTok accounts and averaged 68,300 views per clip. Meanwhile, jordy, who is much less prolific, averaged 550,000 per video for his 20 most recent clips.
His success is the latest example of a shift happening in sports.
When NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was asked in September 2025 about the rising cost for fans to watch every NBA game—they’d need subscriptions to Peacock, ESPN, Amazon Prime, and a linear TV package including ABC and NBC—he acknowledged an obvious truth.
“There’s a huge amount of our content that people essentially consume for free,” Silver said. “I mean, this is very much a highlights-based sport.”
The proliferation of highlights as clips has turned TikTok creators into the most coveted commodity in the sports media realm. The SportsCenter demographic is aging. Even the mixtape era, once dominated by Ball Is Life and Overtime, has been overtaken by Gen Z using CapCut. More people are consuming their sports on sticky social media apps like TikTok and the numbers don’t lie: According to The Omnicore Agency, the average TikTok user averages 95 minutes per day on the app, enough time to come across a jordy edit.
How to. . . Make a Sports Edit
While you may think elaborate software is needed to publish these videos, most are made on CapCut, the sixth-most downloaded free app on Apple’s app store. Jordy, however, is partial to Final Cut Pro.
“I learned to do video editing on a laptop before [the] phone,” he says. “That’s just where I’m most comfortable. But if I need to do something on the fly on my phone, I’ll use CapCut.”
First, editors use software that allows them to directly download videos to their device. This allows for higher quality footage than screen recording. Creators will then put the clips into the editing software (CapCut, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, etc.) which is where the magic happens. The edits comprise lively visuals, quick cuts, and audio syncs that aim to commemorate performances, relive nostalgic moments or promote upcoming games. Once the final hashtags are applied and its published, millions of users can interact with the posts.
Editing these minute-long videos can take from 30 minutes to over two hours. Jordy, however, sometimes works on a post for as long as a week.
Elijah Perez, like jordy, a Warriors fan and content creator, works a bit differently—and not just because he’s partial to CapCut. Perez, who posts under _empmedia29, immediately logs onto social media after games to scour for usable highlights or a funny clip from a post-game press conference. Sometimes he’ll edit through the night and post in the morning, which is best for engagement.
Perez started out making YouTube videos on his phone while taking introductory digital media classes in high school. Similar to jordy, he was inspired after coming across edits online. During his senior year of college, he’d sit in the back of class, downloading clips for when he had downtime. Eventually, he hit it big with an edit of Mo Bamba highlights set to the 7-footer’s favorite song: Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”
Is All of This. . . Legal?
Despite the popularity of sports edits, they exist in a legal gray area. Creators don’t have licences from leagues to post highlights, or approval from record labels to use their music. Technically, they have no right to post their content. Jordy thinks there’s a bit more nuance to it than that.
“You’re putting your own creative spin on it and your time and your ideas and expressing yourself through [the edit],” he says.
Jordy first created a TikTok account in 2022 but the account was deleted after amassing more than 350,000 followers.
“To this day, I still don’t know how that happened,” jordy says. “One day, I just logged on and they logged me out automatically.”
Creators have since migrated to other platforms such as Instagram Reels and X.
The league’s position has been shape-shifting, if not supportive. The NFL had select creators watch the 2025 opening week Chargers-Chiefs matchup on screen as a first time collaboration. And in 2024 the NBA allowed select creators to have their pick at a database of over 50,000 hours of game footage to work with. Leagues normally allow users to post and have even interacted with editor’s posts. It appears that they operate off a mantra that the account can exist as long as they aren’t being monetized at scale.
Still, jordy believes, “there’s money to be made out there.”
Editors are singlehandedly changing the way fans interact with athletes. They are the new gatekeepers. Inevitably, it leads to lucrative opportunities.
Jordy worked with Anthony Edwards on a video for Adidas, with Josh Allen for Gatorade and Kai Cenat’s Little Basketball Association. The Gatorade opportunity specifically materialized when the brand saw a clip he edited on fellow Gatorade athlete Shedeur Sanders.
Perez, meanwhile, has secured work as a photographer and videographer for coaches and personal trainers thanks to his edits. “All of these skills are applicable,” he says. “I believe this is the perfect stepping stone for any freelance creator to do whatever they want in whatever field. . . It’s just that you gotta find the right paths to make it through all of these, you know, licensing rules and regulations.”
