NA LCS in 2017: Week 2 - What exactly is team synergy?

Reignover and his teams lost three sets over the course of three splits -- from the 2015 EU Summer Split to the 2016 NA Summer Split. In two weeks with Team Liquid, he has already matched that total.

I think the impulsive response from a lot of people will be something like, “Wow, what happened to Reignover?” I don’t think anything really happened to him specifically, though. This isn’t like professional sports where players’ bodies are literally less responsive after certain ages. Instead, I want to look at putting a team together.

For example, in basketball, you can’t put five guys on the floor who can’t shoot the ball from a distance. If all five rely on driving the ball to the hoop, then that creates a spacing issue. A smart defensive team would simply clog the paint and dare them to take longer ranged jump shots. As such, when building a lineup, you need players who can shoot 3s, who can slash to the hoop, etc. And it’s possible to run five big guys or five small guys so long as they cover what’s needed. But you need a clear understanding of what your win condition is. For everyone else, it's important to have balance.  

Unlike basketball, the five roles in League of Legends are fairly defined. But if we apply a stylistic concept to League of Legends, then perhaps it comes down to players who can create havoc vs. players who thrive in that havoc. Aggressive vs. passive may be one other way to phrase it, though I find passive has an unnecessarily negative connotation. This was the core behind the Huni and Reignover dynamic to me -- Huni excelled at creating adverse situations, and Reignover excelled at reading them before adjusting accordingly.

It’s less binary than this suggests, but I think you can essentially break a player’s role in a game in terms of aggression as so:

• They are a playmaker / facilitator or...
• They clean up and thrive in the chaos created by the aforementioned

The absolute best players in the world excel at both. But it’s okay to be only dominant at one of these things so long as you have the proper team around you. If you break down the old Immortals squad [Huni, Reignover, Pobelter, WildTurtle,and Adrian], you’d find what allowed Turtle to truly shine again was that he almost always had Huni in front of him. Turtle has a notorious penchant for stepping too far forward, but that’s not really an issue if your front liner is always ahead of you. In this case, it was Huni. And in the past, when Turtle first broke into the scene with TSM, it was Reginald who played that same forward role in the team’s identity.

Basically, if someone can draw the attention of the enemy team, then someone else needs to capitalize on those subsequent blind spots. That someone else was Reignover. Some champions will dictate what you should do, yes, but a player’s individual prowess or preference for a style will greatly influence their proficiency on those champions. This, then, affects the pick/ban phase in both good and bad ways depending on how well coaches understand their players’ strengths.

Asking a player to shift stylistically means unconditioning them from thousands of hours of practice that otherwise made them good in the first place. The perception that Huni can’t play tanks has been already been dispelled this season. Part of that is probably because of SKT’s coaching staff and infrastructure, but I also think it’s because that squad doesn’t need him to be a playmaker. They just need him to stand in front of his world-class backline. It’s less that he sucked on tanks on Immortals and more that he shined in a different role for them.

Team Liquid, however, is in need of playmakers. I don’t like to isolate players and say they’re bad because so many factors affect their in-game performance. For example, look at Moon. He looks like a completely different player than last year thanks to a change in environment. It’s not like he overcame a dearth of talent or anything in the span of a few months. It’s the context which is different. So when I look at TL, it’s hard to point at one player and say they’re the problem.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I love basketball, so let me return to that one more time. Come playoffs or March Madness, what usually happens is the team with the guy who’s playing the best wins the whole thing. Or, at the very least, those teams do very well. That person needs to be able to take over the game. When the shot clock is winding down, they need to be the “oh shit” button. For Team Liquid, that was probably supposed to be Piglet, but this meta doesn’t enable ADCs to serve that role particularly well.

In basketball, that “oh shit” button is usually a contested jumper or some crazy circus layup. It’s a shot most players would be yelled at for even trying. But it changes the flow of the game. In League of Legends, the equivalent is someone who can generate a solo kill or force a pick -- either in lane phase or beyond. It’s the player who breaks the tug-and-pull of the mid-game standoffs. Sometimes -- and we saw this even with Huni -- that play looks nonsensical. Even downright stupid. But it’s a play that’s birthed from thousands of other, similar attempts. Many of which are successful. Other players who come to mind as doing this are Hai and Doublelift. Maybe they just get bored of waiting, but you can count on them to make something happen. Good or bad.

Reignover -- as the newly acquired and prized free agent -- possibly feels that playmaking onus should be on him. Or if he doesn’t, that’s the expectation that’s placed on him by fans. That’s the light he’s now judged in. And I don’t know if that’s fair to expect. He’s well known for his pathing and for being in the right place at the right time -- all very calculated things. But I don’t think of him as being flashy. I don’t think of him as the type of player to solo carry a game. Instead, he’s the ultimate enabler. Huni could go in because he knew Reignover was always behind him.

This doesn’t mean Team Liquid should keel over and die or anything. Not having a player who can sew chaos means you need to have really good teamwork. Easier said than done, right? Or, perhaps, wait for a meta shift. I think an ADC-centric meta would play strongly to TL, for example. In those cases, the ADC just needs a reliable line to position around him. That’s TL in a nutshell -- a bunch of reliable players. They’d serve as a enablers for Piglet.

But, as is, I think it would be beneficial for them to identify who needs to be a playmaker going into each game. Just identifying the responsibility would enable someone to make more aggressive plays. It’s like how in situations of duress, instead of saying, “Call 911,” you need to be specific. You say, “Lourlo, call 911!” This is something to identify in the pick/ban phase. Let’s take a look at the pick/ban phase of Game 1 of their set against Phoenix1 this week:

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A couple things happened here. First, the forced Caitlyn pick was because Liquid gave up Varus in Phase 1 without picking Ashe. This means TL was down an initiate a tool from a role that’s lately become, well, an initiation tool. Cait is an excellent siege champion because of her range and because of the zone of control her traps create. Couple that with Zyra and the two are dominant at disengaging and peeling back.

However, the other three champions offer little outside of general presence when it comes to a siege. Maokai is there to soak damage, and Kha’Zix and Ryze are too squishy to reliably press the turret. In addition, Maokai and Kha’Zix prefer diving the back line, and Ryze can do either, but this already creates a synergy problem.

Kha’Zix needs resets in a fight, but he only gets them if he can reach the backline. And this isn’t always true, but generally, I find that if you have three or more champions who can dive the backline, then your strategy should be to dive. And if you don’t, then it should be to bait fights and then peel. Ryze can do either, so that needs be clarified immediately in champ select. Does Liquid peel back and negate Kha’Zix’s best strength, or do they dive and leave Cait and Zyra to fend for themselves?

Part of that also is reliant on the enemy team. In this case, P1 is guaranteed an initiation at more or less any point in the game thanks to the Rengar and Shen combo. However, it’s best used in conjunction with the Corki package to give them the three diver number I mentioned. Liquid’s only good initiation is a Maokai Teleport flank, which isn’t super reliable. Otherwise, they need Ryze to be the one to catch someone off guard with a flash. Their win condition for fights is simply to get Kha’Zix resets. So Maokai and Ryze need to understand that it’s okay to die so long as they can create opportunities for Kha’Zix.

Of course, this game never really took off as Team Liquid got smashed in lane phase as Rengar snowballed the game. Much of that, though, was due to them not properly respecting the Rengar pick. There's a reason it has a 100% pick/ban ratio right now. 

And to be clear, I’m not saying Team Liquid isn’t establishing these parameters after champion select -- this is just what I mean when I talk about understanding a player’s role within a team. If you look at their one win this week -- against TSM -- it came from a composition of Poppy, Kha’Zix, Ekko, Ashe, and Thresh. Kha’Zix popped off that game because he had at least three champions who could go in before him. Contrast that to this P1 game where only Maokai reliably goes in before him.

Teams who conceptually understand their win condition in a fight will thrive, but setting up that win condition comes in the pick/ban phase. That’s on the preparation of the coaches. I think Team Liquid really needs to sit down and come to terms with their identity. And if not that, then they need to come up with team compositions that are easier to execute -- that is comps with a singular identity. I find diving comps to be proactive and more rewarding to a team’s growth.

I am reminded of the old Moscow 5 vs. CLG.EU rivalry. It was one full of binaries which seemed to stand in opposition. But what they both had was a singular identify. M5 was five hyper-aggressive players. Each of them was a playmaker, so they were always diving. CLG.EU was more passive and peeled back together. They circled around Froggen and let him carry. Watching those two teams dance with each other was a beautiful clash in ideology. This is the kind of synergy that Team Liquid -- among a host of teams -- seems to be lacking.

How struggling teams evolve from here will be dependent on how well their players can adjust their playstyles to fit the holes within their team.

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10 thoughts going into week 3

From last week: “Before you call this a power ranking, it’s not. Unless your definition of a power ranking is an alphabetical list of the standings -- then it’s a power ranking.”

1. Cloud9 (4-0) -- Sneaky is the ultimate clean-up player, so if you surround him with a bunch of playmakers, then this is what happens.

2. Flyquest (3-1) -- Someone in a team meeting last week: “Guys, what if we don’t ban Camille? :thinkingface:”

3. Phoenix1 (3-1) -- I’m surprised people are surprised by them. They surged at the end of the last split and then added three very strong players.

4. TSM (3-1) -- Last year, the Cleveland Cavaliers were the #1 seed in the NBA Eastern Conference and still fired their head coach. Lots of perceptions of not being good enough. TSM feels like that to me, and it’s a great time to be a TSM fan if starting 3-1 is somehow still sluggish.

5. Echo Fox (2-2) -- When they won their second set, do you think they went to the win column and said, “Is there an echo in here or did we just win again?”

6. Immortals (2-2) -- Still not sure how to gauge Flame. The Gangplank pick felt ill-advised, but you can’t blame the dude for just wanting to fight. Maybe let him run ignite and make Pobelter take a split-pushing mid with TP?

7. Counter Logic Gaming (1-3) -- Tough 0-2 week, but they played C9 as close as anybody so far. It’s also not the first time they’ve had a slow start, so there is some hope in this 0-2 week.

8. Team Dignitas (1-3) -- Sometimes they look like they’re among the best in NA, and sometimes they look like the well-memed Dignitas of old.

9. Team Liquid (1-3) -- Wondering if they’ve tried any protect the Vayne comps yet. Would be unorthodox but fun to watch.

10. Team Envy (0-4) -- Guess Lira still needs time to adjust, so I don’t want to write them off yet, but another 0-2 week would more or less be the proverbial nail.

Last thoughts

Reading through this thread about old Warwick made me think about some of the old iterations of champions, which then made me think about champions we haven’t seen in pro play in a while. And I just want to say I really miss seeing Zed in competitive. Assassins in general were some of my favorite champions to watch. And I say that as someone who mained ADC for years and hated Zed when I had to play against it. But watching that champion in action was a real treat, as is often the case with highly mechanical champions. And I also miss old Nidalee, but that’s admittedly because I abused the hell out of it.

Which champions do you miss watching? Think we’ll see any in the coming weeks? Let me know in the comments! And remember that action resumes at 3 pm PT every Friday!

Kien Lam was an ADC main in 2016, but now he’s just a content producer for Riot Games. He was diagnosed with Lee Syndrome at an early age and believes it’s a blessing. You can follow him on Twitter @MeanMisterKien.