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The 'Drake Curse' Has Descended On The Toronto Maple Leafs

Keep your athletes away.
Drake appears to be realizing he's cursed while he attends a playoff game between Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins on Wednesday night.
Kishan Mistry / Yahoo Sports Canada
Drake appears to be realizing he's cursed while he attends a playoff game between Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins on Wednesday night.

Drake's character on "Degrassi" was shot. Drake was once lucky enough to date Rihanna, but messed it up. He's friends with Chris Brown, and in a feud with Paul Anka.

Is Drake cursed?

That's definitely what many sports fans are thinking after this week. On Wednesday, Drake attended Game 4 of the Toronto Maple Leafs' playoff series against the Boston Bruins. He even wore a Leafs jersey for good measure.

This is all within the sphere of what's normal β€” Drake loves repping Toronto, and he's a sports guy. Initially, fans were into it.

But when Toronto lost the game 4 β€” 6, Torontonians started turning on their favourite son.

Let's be entirely honest about the Leafs for a second: the last time they won a Stanley Cup, the first Prime Minister Trudeau wasn't even in office yet. And since then, they haven't exactly been among the NHL's best teams. Plus, it's not like they were undefeated in this series before Drake's arrival β€” they had won two of the previous three games against Boston, so it was always a pretty tight race.

If this were the first time this had happened, maybe it would seem a little unfair to blame Drake.

But it wasn't.

Just last week, the Italian soccer team AS Roma banned its players from taking photos with Drake after a string of bad-luck incidents involving other teams.

Layvin Kurzawa, who plays for the French team Paris Saint-Germain, posted a photo with Drake to Instagram on April 14. Two days later, his team suffered a surprising and devastating 5-1 loss to Lille.

On April 2, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang of Arsenal F.C. posted a photo on Instagram with Drake holding his shirt. On the 7th, his team lost to Everton.

In early March, Drake met several players after one of his shows in Manchester, which led to heartbreak for a number of different teams. Manchester United lost to the Wolverhampton Wanderers and were knocked out of the finals five days after player Paul Pogba posed for a photo with the rapper.

Jadon Sancho, an English player based in Germany, was also at the show. His team Borussia Dortmund lost 5-0 to Bayern Munich a few weeks later.

And just last week, Manchester City lost to Tottenham, several weeks after Man City player Sergio Aguero posted his photo with Drake.

🀟🏽

A post shared by Sergio Leonel Agüero (@10aguerosergiokun) on

In October, Drake hung out with mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor before his big UFC fight against Khabib Nurmagomedov. As you can probably guess, victory went to Nurmagomedov.

Drake poses for a photo with Conor McGregor backstage during the UFC 229 weigh-in on Oct. 5, 2018 in Las Vegas.
Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Drake poses for a photo with Conor McGregor backstage during the UFC 229 weigh-in on Oct. 5, 2018 in Las Vegas.

And then of course there's Serena Williams, who shocked everyone by losing the 2015 U.S. Open to Italian player Roberta Vinci. Guess who was at that game, and was rumoured to be dating Williams at the time?

Drake watching Serena Williams at the Rogers Cup in Toronto in 2015.
Rick Madonik via Getty Images
Drake watching Serena Williams at the Rogers Cup in Toronto in 2015.

OK, fine, that photo is from the Rogers Cup and not the U.S. open. But who do you think won that game? Not Serena Williams! It was her Swiss opponent, Belinda Bencic.

Athletes, beware. Maybe one day, Paul Anka will tell us all of his secrets.

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