zechs
Spring 2022Germany, Berlin, LEC Studio
G2 Esports
Rogue
FnaticIt’s important to own your mistakes and last week I made a pretty big one. I committed the cardinal sin of predicting G2 to lose a best-of-five. Yikes.
Rogue vs G2 Esports
It happens, of course. G2 do lose. They would be unstoppable world champions year after year, if they never lost a series, but with a crowd behind them for the first time in two years, G2 did look unstoppable. The fact that they won so comfortably after I predicted them to lose to Fnatic before even making the finals looks a bit silly, though.
Still, in my defence, basing my prediction on the regular season, and even on early play-offs form, Rogue did look like favourites. The fact that I expected G2 to lose to Fnatic and not even make the final maybe looks suspicious in hindsight, but that had been the outcome just a week earlier. What I’m getting at here, is that G2’s 9-0 miracle run through the lower bracket is one of the most impressive feats in LEC history. They upset the odds in back-to-back matches and heaped further play-off woes onto Rogue’s ever-growing pile.
Let us spare a thought for the runners-up here, by the way. I mentioned in my preview that Rogue are often their own worst enemies, and that a strong mental game would be important in the grand-final. It was, and they didn’t have it. It’s as if Odoamne and Larrsen have a block when it comes to important games and can’t maintain their regular season performance. Multiple Rogue teams have come up short when it matters most, and only Malrang, a new addition to the squad this year, looked anywhere near his best against G2.
Best-of-The-Best
Amid the celebrations and commiserations in the aftermath of G2’s success, I find myself wondering about the LEC format again. People have praised the bracket format of the play-offs themselves, and I agree with that sentiment, but I think we could go one step further.
One of the things that makes play-offs difficult to predict is that that European teams almost never get to play multi-game series. The most successful LEC teams in recent history have played a handful of best-of-five matches in a year. Most get one or fewer. It’s almost impossible to assign an accurate value to that experience, especially when a team like G2 changes its roster so much between seasons. It’s no coincidence that Caps and Jankos were integral to Sunday’s success, though, that’s for sure.
I know best-of-five would play havoc with the LEC’s broadcast format, even best-of-three would require significant changes, but it would improve things so much. For the players, the benefits are obvious: fewer unexpected wins, weird cheese strategies and upset losses. Simply put, the league would become more stable and the teams that go to international events would not be at a disadvantage to Chinese and Korean teams in terms of big match preparation.
For fans and the media, though, all of that is true, but it also ties back in to expectations. If G2 had won multiple best-of-three matches over the course of the season, we could take that into account when deciding how likely they are to win an important best-of-five. Conversely, looking back over some of those losses in the regular split, how many of them would have been wins if G2 had two chances to turn around a 1-0 deficit? We’ll never know.
Alas, LEC shows no signs of switching it up any time soon. The league continues to be a notch above its American counterpart, but several notches behind LCK and LPL and at least part of the blame for that lies with the league itself. It continues to be a weird amalgamation of a league format where over half the teams qualify for play-offs, a split system that I have to google every time I want to discuss it, and a TV-friendly series of one-off matches.
I suspect the latter part of that previous sentence is crucial here. Given the recent back-and-forth over the salary of esports stalwart Sjokz, it’s somewhat safe to assume that costs are an issue. Extending LEC’s regular season to best-of-three matches would likely require more days of broadcasting and certainly more hours of coverage. From here, that sounds like all upside, but those things come with a cost, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that RIOT doesn’t want to extend coverage if it means paying talent for longer hours.
While Europe continues to be comfortably the third best region in the world, we can at least know for sure that the best team won the play-offs themselves. Even in one-off matches, our best teams typically make it to play-offs. From there, the best teams generally win each best-of-five match and since G2 went 3-0, 3-0, 3-0, we can safely say they earned their success. It’s just that – well, it could be better, couldn’t it?