TSM Legends: Breakdown of Episode 5

TSM Legends is a YouTube series that follows the LCS team as they work at becoming the best team in the world.

Like every Friday, Team SoloMid released another episode of their YouTube documentary series – this one being named Triumph.

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• 2023 LCS Summer Split Awards – LCS All-Pro Team

The videos for this series come out a week after everything has happened, so the viewer already knows why the video is named that. TSM had their best performance of the early season last weekend as they won both of their games, but more importantly, they looked good doing it. Here is a quick breakdown of all the good stuff from the video.

The huge standout from this episode was the new zen mentality everyone on the team appears to have now. In the previous video, it showed the team bringing in psychologist Weldon Green to work with them for a bit, but his presence was constantly around in this video – and it seems to be for the best.

At the beginning of the video, Doublelift opens up about how important a healthy mindset is and said, “[As gamers] we don’t have to be strong, we don’t have to be quick, we just have to think better than our opponents.”

Hearing the players talk to each other at the end of games has been interesting to say the least. It isn’t a secret that things haven’t been going so smoothly for TSM this year, and even after wins the team often appears in a melancholy mood. However, after a strong victory over Team Impulse, things started to change a bit.

“Hell yeah,” shouted Hauntzer.

“Feels better,” said Bjergsen.

“It felt a lot better,” added Svenskeren.

The mood is starting to change. Things are becoming more positive. Nice.

Something interesting shown after this game is what they also did in the following match, and that’s having a group therapy session. That term might not sound too good, but it was a healthy and productive group conversation that was being facilitated by a psychologist. Kind of sounds like group therapy, and that’s a good thing.

Most teams don’t do anything meaningful after their LCS matches. If they win, they will sit there and talk about how that was fun and things like that. When they lose, they talk about how sad they are and what mistakes they made. Neither of those types of discussion ever lead to anything productive.

However, Green got all of TSM circled up to have a healthy discussion about specific feelings they had during the game. It was interesting to watch the session play out and it appears to be working with the players.

They second match that weekend was against Counter Logic Gaming, and boy was it a big game. CLG beat TSM at the very start of the season, and Doublelift was still looking for his first win against his former team.

TSM completely stomped CLG in just over 28 minutes, and their reactions as the game was ending showed a lot.

YellOwStaR, sounding happier than he ever has since coming to TSM: “Really nice! Really nice! Really nice!”

Bjergsen, speaking to Hauntzer: “Good job, Kevin. You’re a f***ing beast, dude.”

“I’m proud of you guys,” adds YellOwStar.

With loads of warranted excitement, Doublelift yells, “Let’s f***ing go!”

Those were only some of the comments being said, but know that there were even more positive things being said. It was beautiful to hear.

Later when asked about the win over CLG, Doublelift said, “It was just a weird game. It was one of those games that just kind of flies by because it was so easy. Feels bad to say that, but like, we basically just s**t on them. It was really fun.”

Of course everyone knows that CLG will always hold extra weight for Doublelift as that is the place where he created his name, but it’s surprising to hear him actually open up about it. “I do care, of course. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. I obviously care about beating my former team. Played with Aphro for three years, so I want to beat him,” said Doublelift on beating his former team.

Good for TSM, but more importantly, good for Doublelift. Things probably would have been really bad for him had TSM lost to CLG for the second straight time.

That was essentially it for this episode. It was all about good vibes and showing that the team is headed in the right direction. All the other episodes had a lot of dark moments in them, but this one didn’t have any of that – it was all positive. The players seem to be responding to Green’s methods for them, and the results are already there. This doesn’t feel like a fluke, but rather it feels like a group of people making the turn together.

It’s great that these videos come out the night before the NA LCS, because now we will get to see TSM carry this momentum against Cloud9 tomorrow.

The final thing that needs to be mentioned about this video is TSM’s head coach, well, former head coach. KC Woods was fired by TSM a few days ago, but he was still in this video multiple times. That wasn’t surprising since the footage is old, but it made us look at him in a different way this episode. Even though he was shown multiple times, his presence was literally never felt – and he is supposed to be the head coach. Obviously this video is only a little over 20 minutes long and doesn’t show us the entire picture, but you’d think Woods would have showed us something positive for his sake. He always felt like the least important person in the room, and that’s unacceptable from a head coach.

The video didn’t address the firing or Woods’ situation at all, so hopefully we get some more insight to how all of that went down in next week’s episode.