League of Legends: LCS Week 1 player power rankings

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League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games. /

After one week of LCS play, which North American League of Legends player got off to the best start?

There may not be a lot of League of Legends statistics available after one week of LCS play, but we are still going to take our first crack at player power rankings for each position. That’s right, for LCS Summer 2019, we will be ranking every player in every position by comparing their statistical performance to their contemporaries in that same position (the full break down of statistics can be found here). This will also enable us to give our week-by-week rankings for MVP.

While we may not discuss each player in depth, we will definitely make note of the standout performances (good or bad) every week. To start it off, we’ll look at the LCS top lane, led by a familiar face.

Top lane

1. Eric “Licorice” Ritchie (Cloud9)
2. Kim “Ruin” Hyeong-min (CLG)

For his first LCS appearance, Ruin performed better than most expected and was a huge part of the reason CLG went 1-1 in their first week. Ruin was above average in just about every metric that matters, especially when it came to his laning (he had the second-largest gold difference at 10 and fourth-biggest XP difference at 10) and vision, where he posted the best vision score per minute of any top laner in his first two games. He could stand to be a bit better in terms of kill participation (worst in the LCS) and damage outputs, but a strong start for the rookie.

3. Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell (Golden Guardians)
4. Colin “Solo” Earnest (Echo Fox)

Unlike Jerry Seinfeld, Solo definitely wants to be a pirate. His play on Gangplank in Echo Fox’s upset win over Team Liquid was immaculate, as he outplayed Impact for most of the game. He ranked among the highest top laners in terms of our damage quotient (damage per minute multiplied by one minus the difference of the player’s damage share and the league average damage share), showing his massive impact in team fights.

5. Sergen “Broken Blade” Çelik (TSM)
6. Omran “V1per” Shoura (FlyQuest)
7. Jung “Impact” Eon-yeong (Team Liquid)
8. Heo “Huni” Seung-hoon (Clutch Gaming)

Now, Huni is the first big test-case I looked at when creating some of these new metrics. For instance, his KDA through Week 1 (1.1) was atrocious, due to the fact that he had the most deaths of anyone in the league. However, when looking into some other stats, you realize that Huni is dying so much because he sort of is forced to do everything himself.

For instance, Huni’s kill participation and kill share were both way above average, in the top four among top laners. In addition, even though Huni dies a lot, his share of his team’s death is actually way below the average for top laners (it’s actually third-best behind Solo and V1per). So, yeah, he dies a lot, but he’s also putting himself into the action more often than his contemporaries in the role.

This is what led me to create the adjusted kill participation (aKP), which is a measure of a players kill participation combined with his kill share, less his death share, compared to the averages of those stats among others in his position. With a 1.00 aKP being average, Huni’s aKP for Week 1 is currently 1.14, meaning he’s above average at participating in team fights without dying (the top three in aKP are Solo, Licorice, and V1per).

Now Huni having a high aKP doesn’t offset his godawful KDA, damage quotient, or other stats we looked at, but it provides a bit more insight into how we’re trying to measure contributions with stats. It’s not enough to just have a good KDA if it comes at the expense that comes at helping the rest of your team.

9. Kim “Ssumday” Chan-ho (100 Thieves)

I’m not mad Ssumday, I’m just disappointed. After hyping you up all Spring Split, to have such a pathetic opening week of play was just sad to watch.

10. Niship “Dhokla” Doshi (OpTic Gaming)

Get used to seeing this, folks.

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