League of Legends LCS Summer Playoffs semifinals recap – marry, date, kill Clutch’s world chances

Clutch’s status

Marry: top-five team in NA

There is no question about it, Clutch is one of the best teams in NA. After a whole year of posting solid numbers but not being able to bring it all together, Clutch has finally found their team identity.

Date: top-three team in NA

Right now, it’s between them and CLG. Next weekend will be the warm-up fight, but these two teams will certainly meet in the Gauntlet for the right to prove themselves as that number three team in LCS. It could certainly be Clutch, something most would have thought to be crazy two weeks ago.

Dump: a Worlds-caliber team

Let’s not go too crazy right now.

Liquid’s potential

Marry: Going to Worlds

I mean, I might as well commit to this since Liquid did actually lock in their spot at Worlds by advancing to the finals.

Date: Winning LCS

This should have been in the marry category. Honestly, I was expecting to put this in the marry category before the weekend. But their series against Clutch raised some serious questions about Liquid’s chances entering the LCS finals.

Although some might disagree, I think Liquid matches up horribly with C9 on the top side of the map. Unlike Clutch, C9 will be able to not only adapt their drafts but their playstyles to Team Liquid mid-series, preventing Liquid from being able to exploit easily-recognizable tendencies. And finally, C9 just plain doesn’t have as many players who int with the regularity of Lira or Huni.

Dump: Liquid making it out of groups at Worlds

I’ve been saying for a while that Liquid is a team that can get exploited internationally. Game 5 of their series versus Clutch is the prime example of this.

Backs up against the wall, needing to win, Liquid banned out Huni and Damonte‘s primary champions, forcing themselves to blind-pick Aatrox while ceding some of the premiere picks (like Sejuani) to Clutch. Thankfully for them, Clutch picked Tahm Kench instead of an ADC like Kai’Sa with Xayah off the board, but Liquid then left picks like Kai’Sa, Caitlyn, and Sivir off the board in favor of a Sona/Taric pick.

This draft, and explicitly this bot lane pick, just showcased how little confidence Liquid has in themselves to be able to outplay an aggressive team early on. They basically conceded any chance to win bot lane, put Xmithie in a position to be on a low-pressure jungler (which happened, he ended up on Trundle), and basically putting the onus on Clutch to win early.

This strategy worked against Clutch, who could not get their solo lanes snowballed quick enough (I also hated the Karma mid pick on Damonte, but understand how they wanted their comp to operate into Sona/Taric) but it will not work into better teams internationally. The fact that Liquid had such struggles against Clutch and needed to fall back onto a gimmick strategy that left the meta months ago demonstrates something I’ve felt for a while: Liquid is actually not that good.

They’re strong for NA, but they’ve lost plenty of games that they shouldn’t have (Echo Fox) and were one game from being swept by a dysfunctional TSM in Spring Finals. This team has not been sandbagging or hiding picks, I think they’re just straight up too one-dimensional and won’t be able to handle the pressure of better teams.

Yes, they made the MSI finals, but that was off the backs of Invictus choking more than their own stellar play. Unless Cain has actually been playing 5D chess and has a ton of more aggressive strategies to pull out, I don’t see Liquid making it out of groups unless they get a massively favorable draw.

The LCS season concludes next weekend with CLG facing Clutch on Saturday at 4 PM EST on Twitch.tv/riotgames.