League of Legends Flame Friday: TSM needs to look beyond Grig and Akaadian

Akaadian

There is really no better opposite to Grig than Akaadian in terms of playstyle. While Grig is a bit more solid, yet conservative, Akaadian is volatile and aggressive.

In his three years as a professional player – all at the LCS level – Akaadian has only twice posted an adjusted KDA above two. Grig already posted an adjusted KDA of 2.49 in Summer 2018, which would be better than Akaadian’s highest split. This is largely due to Akaadian averaging 0.25 more deaths per game and more than 1.00 fewer assists per game over his career than Grig.

On the other hand, Akaadian has had some truly stellar performances in terms of his adjusted gold and damage outputs. For instance, in Spring 2019 he posted an adjusted GPM of 203.9, which would be higher than any such measure for Grig in any split – including his one split playing in Challenger Series.

However, this season Akaadian’s nGPM is 173.4, the second-lowest of his career and a full 15 gold per minute lower than Grig’s worst split. For reference, this means that his single split best nGPM would be third-best in the LCS this split, behind only Jake “Xmithie” Puchero and Svenskeren, but his current nGPM is ahead of only Santorin, Lee “Rush” Yoon-jae, and Amazing. Talk about high highs and low lows.

His adjusted damage per minute tells a similar story. While he has an overall better damage per minute over his career than Grig, he has had two splits with nDPM below 200. This would place him in the bottom half of the LCS this split, but unfortunately, Akaadian is actually underperforming his career average and is ahead of only William “Meteos” Hartman, Santorin, Lira, and Rush.