UPDATE: Gatorade Wins the Day for Their Tweets About LeBron Cramping

Photo credit: Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

I’ll start off by saying that the people ripping the people ripping LeBron for cramping are worse than the people ripping LeBron for cramping. Get over it. He’s the biggest star in sports and cramps kept him out of crucial minutes in a Finals game. It’s… discussable, you fun-hating weirdos.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Gatorade’s brilliant real-time marketing. The thirst quencher received many Tweets wondering why they weren’t able to help LeBron get back on the court. The reason? LeBron doesn’t drink their product – he’s sponsored by Powerade (quite unfortunately for Powerade today) – a fact they were all too eager to let their followers know:

The thing is, studies have shown that hydration has little or nothing to do with cramping (via Deadspin), but that doesn’t really matter; the prevailing public sentiment is that it does have an effect, and Gatorade seems happy to play along. As for their competitor? Well, their current marketing campaign couldn’t be more unfortunate:

That sucks. Tough day for Powerade in the drink wars. Somewhere, the guy running All-Sports’ sad Twitter account is screaming to no one in particular, “OUR PRODUCT USED TO TASTE LIKE SODA!”

And somewhere else, Darren Rovell is feverishly masturbating to this sports-business tie-in.

Spurs air conditioning sponsor @ChampionAC says they are not the air conditioning vendor in the AT&T Center.

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) June 6, 2014

UPDATE: Gatorade apologized, with great brilliance:

Well played.