Drake Tosses Jab At Jay-Z During Nets-Raptors Game, His Team Still Loses

Jay-Z caught a bit of flak on Saturday from Canadian-born rap star-cum-R&B crooner Drake, who tossed a playful jab in the general direction of the Throne during the first game of the Brooklyn Nets and Toronto Raptors’ first round playoff series.

Drake joined the TSN broadcast crew on Saturday to add a bit of color to the Brooklyn-Toronto matchup. Jay-Z, for a second, proved a suitable target for commentary from the Toronto-born Drake, who is a Raptors fan and serves as “Global Ambassador” for the NBA squad.

“Jay-Z is somewhere eating a fondue plate,” Drake said, according to Sports Illustrated. Drake noted the apparent oddness of his squad, Toronto, facing off against the Brooklyn Nets, of which Jay-Z was once a partial owner.

“It’s our time. We’ve got to keep it competitive. This is an ironic matchup,” Drake said, presumably pointing to the two teams’ connections to himself and Jay-Z, but also possibly just misunderstanding the meaning of “irony.”

The fondue quip was the latest barb from Drake that drew on Jay-Z’s taste for the finer things. Jay-Z, as anyone who’s listened to any of his last few albums has surely noticed, loves to toss in references to Basquiat, Picasso, and Warhol. Drake, apparently, has had enough.

“I would love to collect [art] at some point,” the former Degrassi star said of Jay-Z’s penchant for namedropping artists in a recent Rolling Stone interview, “but I think the whole rap/art world thing is getting kind of corny.”

True to form, Jay-Z used little more than a couplet to respond to Drake’s criticism:

“Sorry, Mr. Drizzy for so much art talk,” Jay-Z rapped on Jay Electronica’s “We Made It” remix. “Silly me, rappin’ about s**t that I really bought. While these rappers rap about guns they ain’t really shot, and a bunch of other silly s**t that they ain’t got.”

As of press time, there has been no word on whether Drake is tapping away on his BlackBerry, preparing a response to Jay-Z’s quips.

The fondue jab was actually among the more tame things said in the lead-up to Saturday’s Raptors-Nets game. The Saturday edition of the Toronto Sun didn’t mention the Drake-Jay-Z connection, but it did dub the series a matchup between the Raptors and “dinosaurs,” in reference to the Nets’ veteran-heavy squad.

“[The Nets’ Kevin] Garnett and [Paul] Pierce are so old the Raptor had to ask his dad about them,” the paper read.

Not that Jay-Z was paying much attention to Young Garnier Fructis’ quip during the game, but Jigga got the last laugh anyway. The Nets pulled away from the Raptors late into the game, stealing home court from Toronto for the series in what could very easily be the first big upset of the 2014 Playoffs.

Of course, Jay-Z is somewhere beyond the top of the rap game, so he might have more to worry about beyond assorted Canadians throwing rocks at the throne. Jay is said to be plotting a summer tour with his wife Beyonce, and there is still the matter of raising the couple’s two-year-old, Blue Ivy Carter. If that doesn’t eat up all of Hov’s time, he’s also got to manage a considerable fortune, which Forbes just estimated at around $520 million.