While watching LCS does it seem odd the kills are usually under 20 for each team? my normal games usually have kills closer to the 40s for each team. Is it just people not playing as safe in normals or playing a little to greedy?
In high tiers of play its often considered better to simply zone out and force the other laner to retreat while they stay in lane and farm up gold & xp, rather than tower diving just to get a kill and risk getting killed themselves. Then of course you have soloQ games where the skill levels (in terms of summoner's personal skill and their skill with a given Champion) can be very uneven, or can have a premade 3,4,5 against a bunch of randoms, or smurfs, etc. where in LCS everyone in the game is in that top fraction of a percent of play.
Generally you don't see kills in LCS unless someone makes a mistake or until it gets to the team fight stage. People don't make many mistakes at LCS level, so the only kills you tend to get are in the stage where people have no choice BUT to fight each other.
Plus in LCS they don't actively look for kills unless they can get something as a result of it. It's very different to normal games where you have Yasuos running around just so they can pad out their KDA with no idea that they could just be taking objectives.
Higher ranked games usually have a lot less deaths, because higher ranked players make fewer mistakes which lead to death. Also, they're more likely to force objectives after they win a fight, so a few kills quickly become two towers and a dragon and they snowball from there.
If an LCS player chases off an opponent, they will generally not chase, instead staying in lane to farm gold and XP, or group up with the team to move on to an objective
When you put those three together, you end up with very passive lanes in which no one wants to give up any kind of advantage to the opponent. At LCS level play, you're more likely to see a teamfight break out over a blue buff than you are to see someone make a ton of solo kills.
In all honesty, you should never die more than 5 times in a game. If you do, you are not positioning properly or you are making really bad decisions. Pros know better. The only exception is if a hyper carry gets really fed, then you can't really help but die when you run into them.
