By the numbers: who is the best LPL jungler?

The 16 LPL teams have already finished their first three weeks of play, and there is much debate as to who leads the pack in each position. Today, we break down how each team’s jungler has done by evaluating their statistical contributions compared to the rest of their comparables. Who do the numbers say is the best LPL jungler?

Coming into the 2019 LPL Spring Split, there were a lot of candidates for who would emerge as the best LPL jungler. You had veterans like Haro, Karsa, and Ning returning to the fold, as well as rookies like H4cker, Aix, and l3st16 trying to make their mark.

So far, there have been plenty of surprises, good and bad. The question is, now that teams have played about ten games each, who is the best LPL jungler?

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Rather than giving a bunch of subjective takes (we have plenty of those and mine are often wrong), I decided to simply crunch the numbers. I tracked the key stats of each jungler in the LPL (KDA, kill participation, damage, gold, etc.), standardized them for the role, and created three metrics we can use to evaluate each.

The first is the “kill index” calculated by taking the standardized kills minus standardized deaths plus standardized assists (divided in half since an assist is worth less than a kill) and multiplying them by the sum of the raw kill participation and kill share. This should give the rough contribution of each jungler’s KDA influence, accounting for whether or not they’re picking up a bunch of assists thanks to more talented teammates or not dying but also not participating in most of the fights.

Similarly, the “gold index” is a measure of standardized gold per minute multiplied by the player’s gold share. In other terms, it measures how much gold per minute they get relative to the other junglers, then factors if those numbers are inflated by being on winning teams where the other members are generating most of the gold.

The same process is done for damage per minute and damage percentage, though we had hoped to include vision numbers (they were unavailable). Taking all three of these indexes – kills, gold, and damage/vision – we average them to get the overall player efficiency. This is a measure of how much the player is contributing relative to his contemporaries and accounting for whether his team is causing him to get carried.

Below is the full ranking of each LPL jungler (you can find the original calculations here), rated from best to worst in overall player efficiency. In other words, the chart below roughly estimates who the best LPL jungler is as of Tuesday’s games.

As you can see, we have the jungler for the defending champions Invictus Gaming, Gao “Ning” Zhen-Ning, at the top of the pack. Ning is not only the jungler for one of the best teams in LPL, he leads the league in kills and assists, along with being top five in the LPL in kill participation and kill share. Not only is Ning getting the big kill stats, but he’s also contributing to his team’s success at a larger rate than most other junglers.

Behind him, we have the rookie for the best team in the LPL, Suning Gaming, in Yang “H4cker” Zhi-Hao. H4cker has impressed a good bit, being in the top five of LPL junglers in kill participation and kill share (of junglers who have played five or more games).

Some surprises on the list include EDG’s Chen “Haro” Wen-Lin, who is third on this ranking, but whose team is currently sitting in 8th place with a 2-2 record. Another shocker is SinoDragon’s jungler Wang “Xiaopeng” Peng, whose team is doing well – currently sitting in 7th place, yet Xiopeng is third to last on this list (excluding junglers with five games played or fewer). This is likely owing to the fact that he ranks towards the bottom of all LPL junglers in terms of kills, deaths, kill participation, damage, and damage contributed in spite of the fact that he’s played ultra-aggressive champions like Lee Sin (five times) and Nocturne (twice).

Of the teams that are running a substitute jungle system – WE, Rogue Warriors, Victory Five, and JD Gaming – at least two of those teams have easy decisions in terms of who should be starting now. For Rogue Warriors, rookie Xie “XiaoYao” Tao has been the far better jungler in the three games he’s played and should be getting the lion’s share of the work going forward over Li “Xuzhu” Yu-Qing, one of the worst overall junglers in the LPL.

On the other side, Victory Five has split the jungling responsibilities so far, but Tu “Ben4” Xin-Cheng has been far superior to Hu “Pepper” Zhi-Wei. As for WE…well they are in a tough spot as both of their junglers are at the very bottom of the standings, which is quite surprising for a team that just managed to beat EDG this week – largely thanks to huge games from their top and bot lanes.

Who do you think is the best LPL jungler so far this split? Do you think the numbers don’t lie or are there other factors to consider? Let us know in the comments!