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Rapper Wale confronts Raptors announcer Matt Devlin for on-air dig during win over Wizards (VIDEO)

Dan Devine
·Senior NBA writer

Rudy Gay had a pretty nice homecoming on Tuesday night, as the Baltimore native scored 24 points, grabbed eight rebounds and snagged three steals in leading the Toronto Raptors to a 96-88 victory over the Washington Wizards at the Verizon Center in D.C. After the game, though, the big story wasn't Gay's performance, the Raptors' fifth straight win or Toronto improving to 6-2 since trading for Gay on Jan. 30, but rather an odd in-game interaction between Raptors play-by-play man Matt Devlin and rapper Wale.

No, seriously.

Let's get caught up on the weirdness, thanks to our friends at the Yahoo! Sports Minute:

OK, then — let's go step by step here.

After hitting a 3-pointer to put Toronto up 43-39 with just over four minutes remaining in the second quarter, Gay looked over to the sideline as he headed back on defense and made a telephone gesture with his right hand to someone sitting in the front row who'd been chirping at him from a courtside seat. Apparently, it was Wale, a rapper from D.C. who's signed to Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group and received a 2013 Best Rap Song Grammy nomination for the track "Lotus Flower Bomb," off his 2011 album "Ambition."

"Rudy Gay with the 3, and you see his reaction ... and a fan heckling him," Devlin said. "And supposedly, this fan is a well-known local rapper. 'Wall-Ay.' Locally, here [...] Call me after the game, because I just torched for at least a dozen here in the second quarter, and counting. [...] Wale's inspiring, and I'm sure somebody on Twitter can tell me exactly if they've ever heard of Wale. He's not Drake, that's for sure."

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Ouch. While we're sure some Canadians appreciated Devlin repping Toronto's favorite leather-sweatpants-wearing recording artist, Wale didn't seem to dig the combination of being called a "local" rapper and "not Drake." Not only did he take the broadcaster to task on Twitter:

... but, as you see above, he also made his way from his courtside seat up to the Raptors' broadcast booth just before the end of the third quarter, which seems a bit much. Friend of BDL Sarah Kogod of the Washington Post's D.C. Sports Bog talked to Wale for the details:

“I was just introducing myself, that’s all,” Wale told me of his uninvited visit to the booth. “Nah, I wasn’t angry. I was like, you’re not from here, you don’t know. You don’t know.”

The tape, and the fans sitting in the suite behind the booth, tell a different story. As you can see [...] Wale didn’t seem too happy. The fans in the suite with front row seats to the incident (who did not want their names on record) told me that Wale was yelling “I heard what you said. That’s not cool.”

I caught up with Devlin after the game, and he said any “yelling” was a product of the loud arena, and that any beef was Twitter’s fault.

“You know what, we were making fun of ourselves. Making fun, because we’re not hip,” he told me. “Obviously people on Twitter and social media, it kind of took on a life of its own. So he came up, we started talking and there was nothing to it.”

After the game, Gay was quick to downplay the phone-call gesture that sparked the chatter:

And Wale aimed to defuse the situation:

Later, though, Wale resumed striking a reflective, defensive posture:

Yeah, seriously. Since when?

Well, this is all quite crazy and ridiculous, but it appears to have been appropriately simmered down by all parties involved. We only hope that this results in a Devlin drop on "The Album About Nothing," a follow-up to his "Seinfeld"-inspired mixtapes "The Mixtape About Nothing" and "More About Nothing" that will apparently feature Jerry Seinfeld himself, which sounds about as reasonable as anything that happened in this incident last night.

Also, when reached for comment, the Wizards said, "We'd much rather talk about this than the fact that we just shot 38.5 percent from the floor and that John Wall went 1 for 12 with seven turnovers, so this is OK by us. Thanks, Wale!"

Screencap of Wale's visit to the Raptors' booth via J.E. Skeets of The Basketball Jones. If the clip above isn't rocking for you, feel free to check out the weirdness elsewhere, thanks to Beyond the Buzzer and CBSSports.com's Zach Harper.

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