Top lane stain: who are the worst top laners in week 4 of LEC 2019?

Where mid lane hangs on a razor’s edge of skill and ability cooldowns, top lane is dominated by big dumb idiots like Sion and Urgot.

Top lane: the zone of the ascetic, the stoic arena of tanks and control mages. Top lane is perhaps the hardest lane to appraise for those very qualities. These champions love to do two things: farm it up and teleport into the middle of the enemy team (with mixed results).

Yet we have arrived at the top lane of the map, the pinnacle of the mountain upon which our champions sit, meditatively farming their beefy hearts out. And though it may all look like a wet noodle fight, there are tiny advantages gained through poke and pressure, through the occasional gank and the endless circuitous massacre of small blue and purple minions.

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And this parity makes each advantage generated that much more impressive, and each kill given that much more devastating.

It’s a mental game in the top lane, and today we’re going to look at the players who psychologically folded beneath the pressure.

Away we go.

10. Kim ‘Profit’ Jun-hyun

So Sylas finally entered the Rift this week and, uh, he looks pretty bad.

In fact, Profit’s debut on the champion goes down as one of the worst performances we’ve seen this year. He started by committing the cardinal sin of giving away a solo kill first blood in the top lane to a champion that is better in the late game. He followed up this stunning performance by donating a second kill to a Draven who was already up in lane against his opponent.

In this game against OG, not only did Profit seem to not know how his own champion worked, he seemed to have forgotten how the buttons on his keyboard functioned.

Their second game looked much more promising but saw him trade two of his own turrets early to a push by the enemy squad — more of a macro error by his team than a decision on Profit’s part. Further, his inability to carry the rest of his team, despite massive advantages is the cause for some worry.

9. Paul ‘sOAZ’ Boyer

It seems that the Misfits nosedive is well and truly underway as they went 0-2 in Week 4. And while sOAZ was considered to be one of the top EU talents last year, his own Week 4 looked questionable at best.

In his first game against Splyce saw him trade a kill early, before taking a backseat to some excellent play by Febi’s Jayce. However, during the integral fight of the game, we saw a series of terrible engages which featured sOAZ teleporting into the middle of the team after his jungler had already slingshotted to his death. He then decided to engage anyway, whiffing his ultimate and dying to the eventual Karthus ultimate.

That fight saw his team sacrifice their early lead and (after sOAZ was caught out at the beginning of the next major fight) his team lost the game.

In his other game, sOAZ jumped on the Sylas into probably the worst matchup he could have chosen. The greatest minds of our era still ponder this decision, as sOAZ promptly lost lane and became an absolute nonfactor for the rest of the game.

More than actively misplaying, sOAZ never even gave himself a chance to succeed in this game. Even in the rare instances where he could have made a difference, he failed to steal any meaningful ults or make any impressive outplays.