At 10 a.m. Eastern on Friday, Sept. 25, October’s Very Own will release a blue-and-gold basketball jersey inspired by the one seen on Canadian television more than 20 years ago. The original was worn by Jimmy Brooks, the Degrassi Community School star played by a teenage Drake, then credited by his given name, Aubrey Graham.

The OVO x Degrassi Collection pairs that archival recreation with a cotton Panthers football jersey numbered 86 for the year Drake was born. Around those two pieces sit a fleece varsity jacket with layered twill patchwork, a sweatsuit, a heritage crewneck, tees and gym wear modeled on old phys-ed uniforms, and a tote and a sport cap. Everything is made in Canada, and the drop lands a few weeks before Degrassi: The Next Generation turns 25 in October.

According to OVO's collection page, the basketball jersey is true to the one that ran through the show's early-2000s seasons. Jimmy was the Panthers' best player in those years, and his biggest problems still fit inside a school day. That version of the character ended in season four, when a bullied classmate named Rick brought a gun to school and shot Jimmy in the back, leaving him paralyzed for the seasons that followed.

Ben Peace, WildBrain's executive vice president of franchise, pitched the partnership on geography, saying the two brands "share deep Toronto roots." The pieces go on sale online worldwide, in select OVO stores across Canada and at The Grove in Los Angeles.

The wheelchair is the part of Jimmy that Drake once tried to get written out. Writer and producer James Hurst told the story in a 2021 oral history marking the show's 20th anniversary. He recalled a letter from a Toronto law firm saying Graham would not return for season six unless "his injury is healed, and he's out of the wheelchair."

Hurst said he called the young actor into his office, where Graham told him he knew nothing about any letter. When Hurst asked how he actually felt about the chair, the answer was about his standing with other rappers, who he said would "say I'm soft because I'm in a wheelchair." Hurst told him that a kid who survives a shooting is about as hard as a television character gets, and Graham let the matter drop.

In Hurst's telling, the conversation ended without hard feelings. He also pushed the teenager to treat the role as a chance to stand in for kids who use wheelchairs. Graham went back to work, and the letter never became a public fight while he was still on the show.

Jimmy stayed in the chair for several seasons before moving to crutches. Graham remained on the series through 2009, the same year his mixtape So Far Gone carried him from teen-drama credits onto rap radio. By then the image the writers had refused to retire was already circulating without them.

The photo behind the Wheelchair Drake meme came from a 2005 promotional shoot for the show's fifth season. For years, the jokes paired Jimmy's chair with lines from Drake's own songs. In September 2014, a Toronto blogger named Lauren O'Neil and her boyfriend, Steven Stinson, stuck cutouts of Drake's head onto accessibility signs around downtown. Within days the prank had been covered by several major news outlets.

Drake's response over the following year was to show up with the old cast rather than avoid them. In August 2015, the same weekend as his sixth OVO Fest, he reunited with former castmates Daniel Clark, Adamo Ruggiero and Lauren Collins in Toronto. The occasion was a screening of We Are Disorderly, a web comedy starring two other Degrassi alumni.

He went further in 2018, bringing much of the cast back together for the "I'm Upset" video, and in 2023 he wore a Panthers jersey onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. In the 2025 documentary Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, he credited the shooting storyline with giving him something real to work on as an actor, describing the post-injury episodes as material he had to study. "It gave me homework," he said.

What Goes on the Rack

Friday's product list covers the Panthers crest, the gym class, the varsity jacket and the jersey Jimmy wore when he could still run the floor. None of the pieces OVO and WildBrain described refer to the chair, the shooting or the seasons Drake called his homework in last year's documentary.

The football jersey is the stranger object in the lineup. Jimmy played basketball, and 86 was never a number he wore on the show. The most personal detail in the collection points to Aubrey Graham, born in Toronto in 1986, rather than to anyone enrolled at Degrassi. A fan who buys both jerseys on Friday leaves with the character's uniform and the performer's birth year in the same bag.

For viewers who grew up on the reruns, the Jimmy Brooks jersey carries the longest memory. It is the only item in the drop that recreates something Jimmy actually wore on screen. Everything else is new design built around the Panthers colors and the OVO owl, which puts the collection closer to a school-spirit capsule than to a costume archive.

The New Owners Behind the Owl

The collection also arrives less than a month after OVO itself changed hands. On Aug. 27, Authentic Brands Group bought 51% of OVO's intellectual property and Drake kept 44%. Vince Holding Corp. took the remaining 5% along with the stores, the website and the apparel license, a structure HitsCulture laid out in its breakdown of the OVO filings.

Vince chief executive Brendan Hoffman told WWD that Authentic founder Jamie Salter likes to say "content drives commerce," and asked who could prove it better than Drake. Authentic already manages brand deals for Shaquille O'Neal and Kevin Hart. A 25-year-old teen drama with a built-in audience on both sides of the border is the kind of finished content that formula was designed to sell.

Applied Real Intelligence, a Florida lender that bought OVO convertible notes in 2025, says the company owed it C$5,037,977 as of July 31. That figure is laid out in a 391-page motion record an Ontario court accepted for filing on Aug. 13, eleven days before the sale closed. In a statement released Sept. 9, A.R.I. said nobody told the company about the negotiations with Authentic and Vince or asked it for a payoff amount. The lender says it learned of the closing from the Aug. 27 announcement, three days after the deal was done. "We received no portion of the transaction proceeds," the firm said.

The dispute turns on a make-whole fee, negotiated before the financing according to A.R.I., that guaranteed the lender a minimum 15% internal rate of return if the notes never converted to equity. OVO sued A.R.I. in Toronto on June 2, arguing the conditions for that fee had never been triggered, and A.R.I. filed its own claim in British Columbia on June 11. The purchase agreement Vince filed with the SEC required OVO's covered debt, make-whole payments included, to be paid before closing, while excluding one convertible noteholder identified only as a confidential "Specified Person." No court has ruled on either claim, and nothing in the public filings says whether A.R.I. is that person.

WildBrain, which owns the Degrassi library, gets an anniversary campaign fronted by the most famous alumnus the franchise ever produced. OVO gets a Toronto origin story that no rival label can license from anyone else. The version of Jimmy that made it onto the hanger is the one from before season four.