League of Legends: five players who missed the LCS all-pro teams

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League of Legends. Photo Courtesy of Riot Games. /

4. Nickolas “Hakuho” Surgent

I’ve always been of the belief that being a great professional support is about two key things: controlling vision, and not dying to do it. In terms of the former, the only LCS players who are above Hakuho are the ones you’d readily expect (CoreJJ, Smoothie) and a couple you wouldn’t (BIG and Biofrost). However, where Hakuho shines is really in the latter.

His 1.78 deaths per game are only worse than two other LCS players – CoreJJ and Biofrost – meaning that although he’s not quite elite in terms of controlling vision, he is elite when it comes to not dying to get that vision. Excepting for CoreJJ, who has just clearly been the best LCS support in the split, no player has a better ratio of vision score per minute to deaths besides the two other supports listed above.

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While I’ve pretty much already given away my final snub choice, I would like to highlight an area where Hakuho also excels: kill participation. As a support, having low deaths is great but not when it comes at the expense of completely avoiding team fights. Hakuho does better than most at helping his team initiate fights than any other support in the LCS other than (you guessed it) CoreJJ.

One final area where Hakuho does actually perform better than CoreJJ – and this really speaks to how much of a burden he carries for his team – is death share. Despite CoreJJ having fewer deaths than Hakuho, he accounts for more of Team Liquids deaths as a percent than Hakuho does for Echo Fox. This makes sense since Echo Fox is worse than Liquid and tends to die more often, but it also highlights how great Hakuho has been at enabling his team without offsetting those contributions through deaths.

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