League of Legends LCS Week 1 power rankings

5. Team Liquid (1-1)

“But wait, didn’t you just say Liquid was one of the statistically best teams in the LCS?”

Yes, yes I did. Liquid led all teams in terms of percent of game gold earned, gold difference at 15 minutes and had the second-best early game objective control of any team. So how are they only fourth in our early power rankings?

The team they lost that game to, Echo Fox, was one of the worst in terms of early game objective control, gold differential, gold share, and gold percentage spent difference. That game should never have been close, but TL throwing their early lead tanked their loss quality, dropping them just barely below Echo Fox in the rankings.

4. Echo Fox (1-1)

On the other hand, the team that pulled the biggest upset of Week 1, expectedly, jumps ahead of the team they beat in our rankings. Even though this was one of the worst teams statistically in the LCS through two games of play, their win quality is good and losing to an undefeated Golden Guardians team didn’t really hurt them.

3. OpTic (2-0)

The worst of the unbeatens, OpTic’s issue is not just with the quality of their competition (beating two winless teams in 100T and Clutch) but also their statistics. Yes, they have the second-best vision score of all LCS teams, but they also have the longest average game length per win, the lowest kills to deaths ratio of the 2-0 teams, and the lowest percentage of gold spent of the unbeatens.

Put simply, I don’t have a lot of faith that OpTic is as good as the 2-0 record says. Our metrics have them rated closer to Team Liquid than the team directly in front of them. They’re getting an easy schedule this week, facing CLG and 0-2 FlyQuest, so we will see if they can keep this winning streak going.

2. Cloud9 (2-0)

I’ll catch a lot of heat for this, I know, but C9 was not the best team through the first two games of the season. They did have a tougher strength of schedule (and thus higher win quality) than Golden Guardians by playing FlyQuest and Clutch, but their statistics through two games were fairly pedestrian. There was no statistical category, other than gold spent percentage difference that they were better than Golden Guardians.

1. Golden Guardians (2-0)

Speaking of, here is a list of all statistical categories the Golden Guardians lead the LCS in through Week 1: kill-to-death ratio, gold percent rating, early game objective control, percent of dragons taken, percent of first bloods taken, and percent of first turrets taken. This team was a statistical machine through its first two games. The only question is whether they can keep it up when they face Cloud9 on Sunday?

Who do you think were the best and worst LCS teams through Week 1?