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6 thoughts going into Playoffs
Would you take Cloud9 or the field? Here’s 6 thoughts going into the Spring Playoffs!
It’s April Fool’s Day, and I am telling you this because I hate this holiday and if reading this is the first thing you do today, consider yourself prepared. LCS enters the playoffs now with six teams remaining, none of which are Team Liquid (not a joke), and one of which is Cloud9 (the joke is how much better they are than everyone else). Are we playing for second, or does anyone else have a chance? Here’s 6 thoughts going into Spring Playoffs!
**Cloud9 (1) -- C9 or the field?**
After posting the most dominant regular season in the Bo1 LCS era, Cloud9 enters the playoffs as not just “the favorite” or even a huge favorite or the chosen one or the last hope or the rise of Skywalker or whatever. They enter it the same way Tiger Woods once did, which is that betting odds gave you Tiger Woods or they gave you the field (meaning as long as anyone else won, you won the bet). Anything short of winning the entire thing would be a failure for C9. And because I don’t think any other team will beat them, I’m going to do a little thought experiment and exaggerate what I mean when I say “the field.” Could you form a team of five players from the other five teams -- a super team among the playoff teams -- and beat Cloud9 (we also assume they are able to enter the hyperbolic time chamber to acquire synergy)? My roster would be Ssumday/Closer/Bjergsen/Bang/IgNar… and in this hypothetical I would still take Cloud9, though maybe only 3-2. In thinking about this, it made me wonder if you could definitively say Cloud9 has the best player in their position in all five roles -- this is a claim you could make for G2 in the LEC, for example. And I think you could make that claim with Cloud9, but it really only solidifies if they win it all (G2 players can make said claim because they won). This is wild because there’s no way in hell anyone expected this team to be this dominant before the season began, and it’s not like they brought up some Solo Queue superstar genius or anything like that. They just put together five guys (and fries) who clicked (and really well at that) -- it’s a lesson in building a “super team” that others should study and study some more. You don’t have to slam together the biggest names to be good, or in this case, historically dominant.
**Evil Geniuses (2) -- Number Two**
Finish not with a whimper but with a Bang -- EG clinched the hotly contested and coveted #2 seed in the final week of play. The prize is they guaranteed that C9 could not pick them in the first round of the playoffs, which means they have a better chance at making it further in the playoffs. My question, though, is what does it mean to “make it far” in these playoffs? Of course you’re always trying to win when you load onto the Rift, but in the grand scheme of things -- at least for me -- the only thing that matters is winning it all. EG got thumped by C9 in the final week of play, which seemed to perfectly illustrate the massive gap between the eight teams that filled the middle of the table and Cloud9. Is going far just second place? EG has some bright spots they can play around -- in an even money late game scenario, Bang is still going to be one of the most threatening players on the map. He’s the type of guy that as long as he’s alive you think you can still win the game. Jiizuke likewise has had some dominant performances lately (especially on Ryze), which makes me feel good about this team if they can survive the early game. That means all eyes should be on Svenskeren and Zeyzal to buoy the team early -- if they can play like the tandem that helped Svenskeren secure the MVP award last summer, then perhaps they’ll be able to go not just far but all the way.
**100 Thieves (3) -- Stunt Double**
If Stunt ever plays LeBlanc, and his passive is popped, would you call his clone a Stunt double? Don’t act like you’ve never wondered that before. After C9, 100 was the hottest team in the second half of the round robin (8-3 record including tiebreakers), which is a mark that surprised a lot of people (me included). It’s like they truly did sub in a stunt double in the second half of the split. The success crept up on us because their wins weren’t particularly impressive. They weren’t steamrolling people and they weren’t playing mistake-free League of Legends. There wasn’t anything flashy about them, and that’s okay -- you don’t need to be flashy or perfect to win. You just need to kill the enemy Nexus, which is something they became very adept at doing. Losing the final tiebreaker to EG, though, resulted in Cloud9 picking them as their first opponent. Goes to show that the eye test matters more to the likes of C9, and 100 is perhaps not as good as their record down the stretch might indicate. I’m especially curious to see how Ryoma performs in a Bo5 where a team will be able to target him -- both in pick/ban and in how they choose to play the game. His growth in the latter half of the split contributed greatly to 100’s rise, and his performance against Nisqy will be a major factor in whether or not 100 has a chance.
**FlyQuest (4) -- Play to your strengths!**
I actually expected C9 to pick FLY as their first opponent because FLY has been having a bit of an identity crisis down the stretch. Rotating between Solo and V1per hasn’t fixed their slump (though it hasn’t necessarily hurt it either), and I’m pretty concerned for this team as we approach playoffs. It’s definitely a good thing that they have options, but I’d have expected them to settle on one clear starter in Week 9. LoL isn’t like other sports where it might make sense to give two players in the same position equal playing time, but maybe one or the other will be a better matchup against BrokenBlade (and then worse against Ssumday). In either case, it might not even matter who plays top because FLY won’t win games through top side (even if they might lose because of top). This team’s bread and butter is and will be the Santorin/PowerOfEvil combo, and I am a big proponent of playing to maximize your strengths as opposed to playing to minimize your weaknesses. This jungle/mid combo has the ability to put the whole game on their back, and I hope FLY leans heavily towards giving them what they need to succeed. EG looks disastrous when Jiizuke is unable to perform, so definitely look to PoE if FLY is to win this set. Here’s to hoping they stick around for a bit -- the longer they live, the more trees they plant.
**TSM (5) -- Bad time to slip**
Spring 2016 -- when CLG won it all -- was the last time the LCS wasn’t won by TSM or TL, so if you’re someone that wants something new, then you should be rooting for TSM to be eliminated. Though given how long it’s been, I guess you could argue TSM winning a split would also count as something new. TSM unexpectedly dropped both games in Week 9, which means they will begin their playoff journey in the loser’s bracket. It was a pretty sour note to end the split for them, as it felt like every time they were poised to break from the pack to solidify themselves as the #2 team in the league (or even contest #1), they’d immediately fall back down on their asses. Even a pentakill from Bjergsen wasn’t enough to nab them a win, and while Azir isn’t a common pick by any means, I also don’t think it’s unusual. I felt like TSM played pretty standard comps on Week 9 and still managed to lose both games, which is a mark against the idea that they mainly lose because of weird team comps. That said, TSM is 0-6 against Ornn this split, which is probably one of those weird stats that looks a lot worse than it is because of the small sample size of games. But -- and maybe this is crazy -- what if you just… banned it? Add that to the game plan, TSM.
**Golden Guardians (6) -- Golden Gods**
If you told me you had GG in the playoffs before the season began, then either you’re Goldenglue’s mom or you’re a prophet who should look into fortune telling as a business venture. Also please DM me the lottery numbers. Honestly, though, I don’t even know if his mom predicted this. Kudos to the team and to the org for being able to make this run with a roster that very few people had faith in. In Week 9, they even pulled out a neat Ziggs support pick that helped them win the game (and made a ton of sense considering Huhi is formerly a mid laner). I still don’t really have high expectations for this team, but that’s primarily because they’ve already shattered my expectations. This is like when you skip a rock across the water hoping for it to just bounce even once and then it just keeps bouncing -- at that point you just kind of watch in awe. It doesn’t matter when the rock sinks because it’s already accomplished its job. At some point you think maybe the rock can make it all the way across. I’m excited to see how Closer performs in the playoffs -- I voted for him as my 2nd Team All-Pro this split, and a Bo5 where you are against the same jungler over and over is where I think skill expression can really be flexed.
**Bonus Thought -- RIP Liquid**
On Monday night I had a dream that I was a secret agent, and alongside two other agents, we were tasked with hunting down Doublelift. We had the curly wired headsets running into our suits, pistols, sunglasses -- the whole shebang. All we had to do was catch him. We did not. This is to say that even in my dreams I can’t put a finger on Doublelift and what happened to him and TL this split. There are tons of things we can speculate on (motivation, how much they cared, etc.) but the end result is the only thing that’s definitive. They finished 9th after winning four splits in a row. I don’t think the roster change was that big of a deal either -- they added Jensen and CoreJJ for championships #3 and #4, so they have experience with bringing in new players. Was Xmithie really the glue that held this ship together? Maybe, but I don’t feel like Broxah is an inferior player. Maybe it goes back to my musing on Cloud9’s synergy -- what does synergy actually mean? Teams that win a lot tend to have more fun. They joke often. We call that synergy when it should just be called winning. Then there are teams that get slammed and we say they don’t have synergy, but if you think back on all the times you’ve teamed up with people for something -- be it Clash or Ranked 5s or a school group project -- sometimes you can all be aligned and have a great natural chemistry with each other and still do a poor job. You lose Clash. You bomb the presentation. The opposite can be true too. I guess this is a winding way of me saying synergy is just a fancy way to say good or bad, and this split Team Liquid had no synergy, which is to say they were bad. And bad is just our way of saying they didn’t win -- it’s a result-based adjective. They now enter an extended break for the first time in two years. May they use it well. May they find their synergy.
