*The biggest storylines going into Summer are Doublelift’s return to TSM and push from every team to close the significant gap that Cloud9 established in the Spring. Here’s a look at a few things driving these teams and how that intersects with the new-format Summer Split that lets you undo all your Spring failures.*
**SAME OLD DOUBLELIFT**
These days, a lot of people I talk to mention the great mental exhaustion we all seem to face. It can make otherwise simple tasks like folding laundry or going to the grocery store feel like climbing a mountain. That tiny voice that asks “does anything even matter?” is, to me, one of the unfortunate backdrops of summer. And when Uzi announced his retirement, I felt regret for how his body withered down even though he’s only in his 20s. But I also thought of some of the famous pictures of him, like the one where he is hunched in front of a TV in tears as he watches the team that just beat him give a winner interview. I thought of the headlines that followed his every failure. And I thought of the immense mental relief that must have accompanied the physical pain of retiring.
We are quick to talk about the physical side of the sport and slow or altogether avoid it when the mental aspect comes to play. I asked Doublelift about Uzi and about the difference in reception to someone being physically exhausted and being mentally exhausted, and he says, “You can’t really argue with physical exhaustion because there’s literally a limit before your body gives out. But if it’s mental exhaustion, a lot of people can view it as a copout when you say ‘I’m burnt out’ or I mentally don’t have the gall, drive, or motivation *right now*. People will just say, ‘Suck it up.’ It just seems a lot less real because it can be used as a copout for someone who’s just not playing well, but I think -- as someone who’s obviously experienced it -- very real.”
He continues, “Someone like Uzi, who I respect a ton, I think he must have experienced both honestly. I don’t think it was only purely physical. You can’t really be giving it that same level of pure dedication the entire time. There’s going to be times where he’s mentally exhausted too.”
What’s going to happen now that Doublelift has returned to TSM is that the biggest spotlight is going to shine on him. I don’t expect people to look at him with empathy for taking his foot off the pedal in the spring -- he has acknowledged it to be a mistake and apologized for it. It still doesn’t change what happened, though, so people don’t have to accept the apology. That’s fine, too. I don’t expect the narrative to be any more forgiving now that he has left and returned to TSM. If anything it’ll be more vicious. I don’t expect them to be the same championship-caliber team the last time he was here, but I don’t expect that light to dim even once.
I do believe him when he says he was dealing with burnout last split. I do believe that he didn’t just suddenly drop off a cliff to a point where he can no longer return to being the best player in the league, and I believe him when he tells me, “I realized in this transition to TSM, the thing I really want and what makes me really excited is the thought of winning with *this* roster.” I believe that winning fixes everything -- if only because people are quick to forget.
Still, there is no delusion like the last time he joined TSM that he is the victim here. With more championships than fingers on a hand, his career could end now and he’d still be the single most decorated player in the history of the league. I am not asking for empathy for him. He isn’t either. I am just thinking about regret and all the ways it can manifest. A team towards a player’s departure, or vice versa. A whole career of missteps or what-if steps. I am thinking about how some people, like Doublelift, are given chances. Many of which he earned and others he did not. Some, like Uzi right now, are not. And I believe, whether they are “fair” or not, Doublelift always does something with his chances. That’s why they keep coming.
**TESTIMONIALS**
Spring Split’s Cloud9 posted a cumulative 26-2 record, which was the best in LCS history. I asked players from every team to give me their thoughts on C9:
“In my mind, there were only three teams that were *that* far ahead of everyone else. It would be Immortals in 2016 with Huni and Reignover, TSM in 2016 Summer, and then Cloud9 [now]. It’s really exciting because there’s actually a real challenge -- an attainable goal as an underdog now, and it makes me really motivated to practice.” -- Doublelift
“I think Cloud9 during the Spring Split was just on a different level from all the other teams, including us. We just didn’t understand the fundamentals as well as they did. They just really understood how they wanted to play the game, and towards the end of the split we struggled with how we wanted to play it.” -- Svenskeren
“I think for C9 compared to every other team, they have a proper coaching staff and know how to play as a five man unit. They help each other, whereas other teams have people who don’t improve during the split.” -- Johnsun
“Everything we do needs to ask -- ‘Is what we’re doing good enough to beat C9?’ We have to compare everything we do to if it will matter against C9, because that’s the level of competition we need to strive to every day, and if we do that for the entire split, then we have a really good chance to win.” -- Solo
“Cloud9 has Top 2 players in every role -- they’re all good individually. They’re just a team that’s willing to sacrifice for each other. They have a really solid team identity where they play around mid/jungle and transition that to bot lane. Licorice is really good at weak side and strong side -- they’re just really well-rounded and play well as a team.” -- FBI
“I feel like we kind of went blow for blow with them in our last game of the Spring Split, but I’m pretty sure they’re a step ahead, even right now. They’re all just individually really good and really smart about what they want to do. Their teamwork is really good and they’re just hot right now.” -- Pobelter
“I think all of C9’s players are motivated and have the same end game. When you look at even the Solo Queue rankings, most of them are Top 10 [or at least high]. It’s still pretty difficult to hit Rank 1 [especially] and I think Zven has a really good mentality when he plays Solo Queue. He always tries hard and plays to win -- a lot of people, even for me, if something goes bad I sometimes quit in Solo Queue. But I think it’s a good mindset to put 100% into winning and think each game matters. You need to have that same mentality for scrims as well.” -- Altec
“I definitely felt like C9 was way more dominant than every other team. I don’t know if they were *more* dominant than us when we were winning, but it definitely felt like they were head and shoulders above every other team. Playing against them was a struggle because they played so fast and they were all on the same page -- they had really good coordination when it came to everything.” -- Jensen
“From what we’ve heard from the players, they have a really good system. They have gym everyday, healthy food, and apparently even a book club -- they do all these different wellness things. A good esports system doesn’t need to be too complicated -- it just needs to have health, exercise, and a good practice schedule.” -- Stunt
“I would prefer if there was someone in the league who could actually [challenge us]. All of these teams are saying they are going to do it or that’s what they’re looking for, but honestly they’re just not good enough. At least not yet. They’re pretty much all talk. Hopefully they’ll be able to perform better and actually be able to contend against us -- that’s what I really want. It’d be good for us to go into Worlds with another team that we can learn from throughout the split.” -- Blaber
**BE THE CHANGE**
“This is actually the first team I’ve been on in my entire career that has kept the same roster twice in a row, and I’ve been playing for years,” says Stunt. “Just the smallest roster change can throw team synergy out the window -- a good example recently was TL with the introduction of Broxah over Xmithie. I felt like Xmithie kept their playstyle of playing around bottom. They had a clear identity and they were good at what they did, and without Xmithie, they’re kind of lost and trying to find themselves again.”
He continues, “For us, the benefit of keeping the same roster is you don’t have to start from the basics. With just one new member, that new member has to learn all of your systems from square one, whereas we already have our systems in place for how we like to play the game, and all we have to do is build on it and figure out what the problems are with what we are doing right now. We have a really strong baseline.”
I’ve spent a lot of time this offseason thinking about when and how roster changes make sense -- a lot of it comes off the heels of, as Stunt mentioned, what happened to TL. One thing I’ve always believed to be true and is backed by results is that truly great teams -- I am talking about those who win Worlds or could/should have won Worlds (hello, ROX fans) -- have more or less always been dominant from the immediate moment they were formed. Sometimes they wither and fade away, sure, but they don’t start by struggling.
What we have in the LCS right now is one team in Cloud9 who was built this year and immediately destroyed the competition out of the gate. A lot of people suggested that the LCS was overall weaker in the Spring, but the league as a whole wasn’t that bad -- they were just all clearly worse than Cloud9. So how are you supposed to close the gap without a bold change (like a roster move) if C9 is always improving as well? Unfortunately, there’s no real guarantee that a roster change is going to work. I don’t have stats on this but I figure the odds of becoming worse are also pretty high, especially if you were already a solid team to begin with (2nd place FLY who did not change, for example, has much more room below them than above).
Not changing a roster lets you build on foundational blocks for what a good process and regimen is -- both for daily rituals like eating and sleeping (which gamers tend to neglect) and for in-game things like how much you want to prioritize early scuttle control or how you want to prioritize counterpick when drafting. There just isn’t a definitive answer to whether you should or shouldn’t change a roster. Ultimately whether a roster change was good or bad is going to come down to the results -- that’s how we’ve always judged them, whether that’s fair or not.
Liquid, for example, was memed pretty hard for collapsing when they brought in Broxah (and then Tactical, and then again when Doublelift returned), which makes you think they made the wrong move. But that’s only in a vacuum where their goal was to win the LCS again. In the greater context of wanting to win Worlds, maybe they truly had hit their ceiling with Xmithie -- at that point you *should* make a change no matter how it turns out. Only by risking getting worse can you get better. The needle has shifted greatly for Liquid, though, after just one split. Doublelift is gone for good, and so is their long perch atop the LCS.
Jensen says, “Being the team that always wins or is expected to win doesn’t feel as good. It’s hard to stay on top because within NA, it’s hard to learn a lot from the practice because even if you lose, you think, ‘Oh, we’re better than them. It was just an off day.’ I think a lot of my teammates felt that last split. We were too comfortable with our position. This time around, I can’t imagine we’ll make the same mistake because we realize we’re just like any other team right now. We shouldn’t feel ahead of them. We’ll start playing more like the underdog and playing with the mindset that we have to learn from any team because we just had a 9th place finish.”
All it takes is one split to completely change your approach. Pobelter, for example, didn’t even have a team at the beginning of last split and fans (who once clamored for his benching) found it to be completely outrageous that he didn’t have a job. Then he came in for a dead-last CLG team and was showered with maybe more praise than at any other point in his career. He told me, “I have not felt better than those few scanty little wins we got last split. Those were some great hits of dopamine.” That’s wild to me to put those meaningless wins on the same level as the championships he’d won in the past, but I don’t doubt it for a second.
Everyone wants to win even if their reasons for wanting it are going to differ, and in sports that means someone else is going to lose. It is this simultaneous moment where you secure your dream by denying someone else’s, just as rising to the starting lineup for one player means another player must step down. This split is going to feature nine teams jumping as high as they can to reach Cloud9, and if I am going to be honest with you, I don’t think any of them will make it.
But Summer has always been the split where you can fix all your Spring wrongs, and this year that is even more pronounced. Nothing you did in the Spring matters in the sense that the points don’t contribute to Worlds placements at all. And yet, still, everything you did matters. Or everything you didn’t do. No one can tell Doublelift that the Spring Split which saw him leave for TSM didn’t matter, even if he sang a different tune at the start of it. No one can tell Cloud9 the dominance they embodied and learned doesn’t matter for their Summer preparation. Even still, by making the Summer yours and only yours, you can make all of that not matter. There is only this, right now.
