Drake Is the True Villain of the NBA Finals

For reasons no one needs to know—seriously, don’t worry about it—I watched the fourth quarter of Game 6 of the 2019 Eastern Conference finals at the Cheers bar in Boston. My friends and I were casually rooting for the Bucks, mostly because I cannot physically rest until extravagant and globally televised vengeance rains upon every enemy of the Philadelphia 76ers. (I was, however, rooting for Marc Gasol to have a good game, since he comforted our big man in his time of sorrow and I will remember and honor this fleeting act of human kindness until the day I die.)

If only to understand how and why they too are spending a Saturday night watching a basketball game at a tourist-trap bar based on a syndicated television show, it is customary to talk to the person sitting next to you at the Cheers bar. Our neighbor was a former Marine from South Carolina who was rooting for the Raptors, mostly because he’d been following Kawhi Leonard since seeing him play years ago at a San Diego State game and he had every reason to believe this was finally Leonard’s superstar-making postseason run. Fair enough. And so we and this stranger spent the next half hour cheering at different times, yes, and our moods were quite different upon leaving the bar, but even in such a polarized situation we were able to find some common ground. “Do you at least believe that Drake needs to chill?” I asked this man toward the end of the game. Oh yes, he said, without hesitation. Absolutely.

It is perhaps the only thing we can all agree upon as a nation, if not an entire species existing within an interconnected biosphere: Drake needs to cool it when sitting courtside at basketball games.

Before the evening of May 21, 2019, no shoulder massage in history had ever created more net tension in the world than it alleviated. And then, with nine and a half minutes to go in the fourth quarter of Game 4, popular musician and nonathlete Aubrey “Drake” Graham snuck up behind Raptors head coach Nick Nurse like an entitled little Reiki elf, gave two vigorous rubs to his deltoids, and then—before Nurse’s face had a chance to register any awareness that this happened—exited frame to cause god-knows-what kind of untelevised mischief.

The Massage has already been memed into oblivion, and I have watched a looped video of it approximately 1.7 million times, and yet my blood pressure still rises every time I see Drake bust into the shot like a handsy Kool-Aid Man. My dude … please be seated.

Let’s leave aside, at least for the moment, the question of unwarranted physical touch. What bothers me most is the generalized sense of permission with which Drake walks around the sidelines of Scotiabank Arena, with the half-conscious air of a man popping into his own kitchen to make a midnight sandwich. He’s so at home on the court that I’m sometimes surprised to see he’s even wearing shoes. The Rub wasn’t an isolated incident, of course: Drake has spent the entire 2019 playoffs springing to his feet at random like an oddly emotive jack-in-the-box, and he has also reveled loudly in the misfortune of opponents like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid, two men who, unlike Drake—and I cannot stress this enough—are professional athletes who play in the National Basketball Association. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for celebrities like Jack Nicholson, Ansel Elgort, and Jack Nicholsonson (what Jack Nicholson’s close friends call Jack Nicholson’s son) having fun at basketball games. But what Drake has been doing this season feels different, more disruptive, more About Him. It has the air of a man who has indeed been in Marquee when it’s shut down, who just named a very large private jet after himself, and who believes he can easily get any last thing he desires, even if a certain cosmetics mogul might beg to differ.

“There’s certainly no place for fans and, you know, whatever exactly Drake is for the Toronto Raptors,” Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer said after the game. “There’s boundaries and lines for a reason, and like I said, the league is usually pretty good at being on top of stuff like that.” “Whatever exactly Drake is for the Raptors” would have been a decent burn had the Bucks won the series. But instead, Toronto’s grinning celebrity bodywork specialist triumphed, and will live to gloat courtside another day. It is a loss for us all as a people, but we must come to terms with it: Drake and his antics are going to the NBA Finals.

Even short Kevin Durant for the past five games of their playoff run, the Warriors’ appearance in this year’s Finals still seems like an anticlimax. For yet another season, the Dubs have been so dominant that their greatness is sort of boring. I can hardly imagine a casual observer finding it fun to root for a team that’s making its fifth consecutive appearance in the championship series, especially when they’re playing a team making its NBA Finals debut. But then again, as you may have heard, Drake did this.

Has Drake made it fun to root for the Warriors again? It’s complicated, and since fun is usually uncomplicated, I’m going to go ahead and say “no.” Sorry. Because perhaps the most annoying thing about Drake’s role as NBA Finals Villain is that in some sense he is going to be happy no matter who wins. The Raptors are Drake’s hometown team, it’s true, but he’s also made his Warriors fandom known in his lyrics and on the increasingly aesthetically questionable canvas that is his body. If the Warriors have yet another championship to celebrate in the coming weeks, it’s not hard to imagine Drake once again joining Steph Curry for some carefully staged public laughing at In-N-Out. “Golden State running practice at my house,” Drake boasted on his single “Summer Sixteen.” (Though Curry later clarified that the event this line was based off was more like “Steph Curry and his brother-in-law playing one-on-one at my house while my friends and I watch in the stands.” Poetic license, fine.) He also name-dropped Durant on 2016’s “Weston Road Flows” (“shout-out to KD, we relate, we get the same attention”). At press time, Drake has yet to mention the Raptors’ dinosaur mascot by name in a song.

One silver lining of this communal struggle is that you can at least make some money off Drake’s worst behavior. The gambling site Bet Online is allowing users to take part in a number of prop bets like “Will NBA Warn or Ban Drake for Antics?” (+750), “Will Drake Respond to Smash Mouth on Twitter Before the End of NBA Finals?” (+200), and “Will Drake Have an On-Court Physical Altercation with a Warriors Player?” (+2500). The line on that last one still seems a bit low but, as always when risking catastrophically large sums of money, follow your gut.

Perhaps the reason Drake’s courtside theatrics are so universally irksome is that it’s a reflection of a larger dynamic in the past half-decade of pop culture: No matter what he does, Drake just cannot lose. He is omnipresent, he is foolproof, he is too big to fail. He is the home team and the away team, the alpha and the omega; he’s the grinning golden boy pumping his fist like an underdog. But you know a few things that Drake is not? A professional basketball player, a member of an NBA coaching staff, or even (at least to my knowledge) a licensed massage therapist. So by all means, Drizzy, have as much fun as an absurdly rich superfan possibly can. But when game time comes, might I offer up the advice of one of California’s favorite sons: Sit down. Be humble.