Drake, Raptors and Maple Leafs all take L's in succession

Keep this in mind about rap beefs, like the one that intensified last week between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

They're like standup comedian Katt Williams' Internet-breaking interview with Shannon Sharpe — filled with facts, half-truths, tall tales and fabrications.

Only the person making claims knows which is which, and in what measure. Lamar, the Pulitzer Prize winning rapper from Los Angeles, says Drake is a deadbeat dad with an entourage full of sex offenders, and fetish for underage women.

Drake, the Toronto-born superstar, accuses Lamar of spousal abuse, and Lamar's wife of infidelity. Each says the other suffers from deep-seated racial self-hatred.

This is ugly, petty, spiteful stuff, and, as listeners, we'd be smart not to take much of it literally. It's two guys with active minds and huge egos channeling their creativity into hurting each other's feelings. If we're not bracing for exaggeration, we're doing it wrong.

Still, for the combatants, there's room for self-awareness. And on Saturday night, as Drake absorbed yet another lyrical beatdown from Lamar, he appeared to show some by allegedly deleting a picture of himself alongside retired NBA star Karl Malone from his Instagram account. 

It happened as Not Like Us, the latest and catchiest of Lamar's diss tracks, and the one alleging that Drake cavorts with teenage girls, set the Internet ablaze. We saw footage of people jamming to it at pool parties, before it spawned a TikTok dance challenge. Against that backdrop, a photo with Malone, a famously absent father to a son whose mother was just 13 when Malone, then a college student, impregnated her, would only supply Drake's trolls and rap rivals with more material.

So the photo disappeared around the same time