League of Legends: who should be the LCS Spring Split MVP?

Lucas “Santorin” Tao Kilmer Larsen (FlyQuest)

The case for him: I wanted to find someone who has added the most “value” to his team (sorry, Ssumday, an actual successful team) this split and Santorin appears to be the obvious candidate. Of the winning teams in the LCS, this split – Liquid, C9, TSM, and FlyQuest – only one of those teams does not have multiple players ranked in the top three in their position.

That would be FlyQuest, who only has Santorin as the third-ranked jungler, along with the seventh-ranked top laner (V1per), fifth-best mid (Pobelter), seventh-ranked ADC (Wildturtle), and sixth-ranked support (JayJ). FlyQuest is, on the surface, a team with middling talent. Yet they just knocked off Team Liquid, secured their spot in the playoffs, and could be only the fourth LCS team to finish the split with over a .500 record should they win one of their games this weekend.

It seems Santorin is a big reason why FlyQuest is greater than the sum of their parts, or at least he is the greatest of those parts. He has shed the meme of being a walking ward like he was on TSM, and currently boasts the best kill participation and gold difference at 15 minutes among all junglers. He also has the fewest deaths, with respectable gold participation and vision scores to go along with them.

Santorin has enabled the rest of his team to be better than they should be. He’s driven the play in the early game and is quite frankly outclassing most other junglers, save Xmithie and (barely) LirA. By elevating a shaky roster to be a good team, Santorin could easily be said to be the player who gives his team the most value in the LCS.

The case against him: I mean, he’s the third-best jungler. It’s kind of hard to justify giving him the award for most valuable player when statistics acknowledge that there are two other junglers (one on a worse team than him) who are performing better.

Who do you think should be the LCS MVP for this split? Let us know in the comments!