League of Legends LCS finals preview: How strong is the Liquid playoff buff?
By Josh Tyler
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If the Liquid playoff buff is a real thing, there is no better test case than Impact. In the regular season, Impact was one of the worst top laners, statistically, in the league. He was constantly behind in lane, had some of the lowest kill participation and damage share numbers in the league, and died the most of anyone on Liquid other than Jensen.
In the playoffs, however, Impact isn’t just a different player, he’s a different species. His numbers from regular season to playoffs are a night-and-day comparison. Better numbers in terms of kills, solo kills, deaths, gold per minute, gold share, kill participation, kill share, damage share, damage per minute, vision, and gold difference at 15.
According to our estimation, if Impact had maintained this level of play during the regular season he would have been the best top laner in the LCS and actually deserved that _ team all-LCS award. He has completely come online and become the beastly former World Champion he was advertised as being back on Cloud9. So what’s been the secret?
Well, for one, sample size is a big factor, as Impact’s improved statistics came from a sample of three games as opposed to his 18 regular season games that showed a decreased performance. Secondly, Impact had the luxury of getting to go against one of the other worst LCS top laners from the regular season – FlyQuest’s Omran “V1per” Shoura.
Despite winning the LCS Rookie of the Split in spring, V1per was statistically one of the three worst top laners in the LCS (along with Impact himself and CLG’s Darshan “Darshan” Upadhyaya). Certainly, Impact’s godly performance should not be understated, but recognize that it came against perhaps the weakest competition in the playoffs.
On the other hand, Broken Blade had to face Echo Fox’s Colin “Solo” Earnest and C9’s Eric “Licorice” Ritchie during his playoff run. While Solo was a slightly below-average top laner in the last split, Licorice was one of the best tops in the LCS and was recognized as such by being named first team all-LCS.
Broken Blade – a third team all-LCS awardee himself – thus had to play against tougher competition in the playoffs than did Impact, and he has a bigger sample size of statistics to work from (nine games as opposed to Impact’s three). And, surprisingly, despite all of that Broken Blade himself has shown an improvement in his statistical performance during these playoffs, recording fewer deaths, improving his kill participation and damage share numbers, while maintaining his typical gold counts.
I’m of the opinion that we can be more confident in Broken Blade’s playoff performance than Impact’s. The Liquid playoff buff might be active, but I can’t definitively say it can overcome the massive performance gap between Broken Blade and Impact during the regular season.
Advantage – TSM