Liquid/NA
I'm not happy with HOW liquid is handling their poor performance at msi, but I'm neither surprised nor disappointed with the fact that it IS happening. The signs were honestly there before msi play-ins. All the doublelift posts of playing with old teammates and no gameplay with olleh outside of 5 man scrims seemingly. There seems to have been some trouble and not ever the same amount of bonding between the two to begin with as there was with rush hour. It makes me sad because Olleh is such a nice guy. He also has a ton more experience and knowledge than most realize or credit him for... having played professionally in multiple leagues before coming to NA and doing well in them.
Doublelift has burned through a number of supports only to go back to them later and realize just how good they were. I'm not sure what to think of the guy because there's only so much you can see from the outside w/o being in liquid's gaming house or whatever and there's multiple interpretations of why something happens depending on whether you want to take a positive or negative approach. But I will say regardless of what is actually going on, he should be the FIRST person to be going out of his way to help Olleh and encourage him. And if liquid has to make some more permanent roster changes, I honestly think they would be smarter to keep Pob, Xmithie, and Olleh than try to find a replacement support and keep Doublelift. Those 3 just have great synergy and seem really easy to work with.
As far as liquid's performance at msi... they aren't playing anything really new - same stuff as in playoffs run. The only difference being Xmithie graves... which I'm not a fan of. It's not that he's a bad graves or a bad player - I'm a huge fan of his - but it's that the TEAM plays best when he's on more of a playmaking champ that's a bit tankier. I think the team would honestly look better with him on something like a gragas than on graves or perhaps even trundle. Their struggles are due partly to playing too much to the meta without really accounting for the strengths of the individual players. If someone's best on an engage champ and their teammates play best when they can follow up on said person's engage, you don't suddenly put them on a squishy backline dps champ for example (just giving hypothetical example here - not naming names) simply because that's more meta. Sure there's some need to adapt, but play to your strengths too. Just look at gigabyte marines last year... or evos. Sure they aren't undefeated, but they did better than people expected because they played what THEY were GOOD at. Not just being meta slaves to the point you throw away what your player is good at in favor of a meta pick that doesn't play to their strengths.
As far as why I'm not so upset about this happening... it was bound to happen sometime. If liquid can pull themselves together and actually forge themselves into a unit that TRUSTS each other and SUPPORTS each other completely, then they can learn from this, regroup, and go into worlds a much stronger team for it. They can be the team at worlds that analysts thought they would be at msi. And no one will expect it because of their msi performance. Time to channel your inner c9 team liquid.
