League of Legends LCS 2019 Summer Playoffs runner up game preview: Clutch vs. CLG

Bot Lane

ADC: Cody “Cody Sun” Sun vs. Trevor “Stixxay” Hayes
Support:  Philippe “Vulcan” Laflamme vs. Vincent “Biofrost” Wang

This is, in my mind, truly a battle of which top performer can carry their less-than-stellar lane partner further. On the one hand, we have the man who leads all playoff ADCs in KDA, death share, and damage per minute despite facing the best bot lane in the LCS last round in Doublelift/CoreJJ.

Cody Sun was, by my measures, the second or third-best AD Carry during the LCS Summer Split, ending up edging out Zven for the second spot behind Doublelift. His insane 4.7 adjusted KDA during the season (beating out Doublelift’s 4.06 aKDA) has offset his underwhelming gold shares.

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He’s paired with Vulcan, a player who was by no means bad throughout the regular split or even in the playoffs. He has the second-best kill participation of supports in the LCS playoffs (behind Smoothie), but he has the highest death share by a mile. One of the biggest concerns for him is that he has some pretty poor laning numbers that continued into the playoffs, despite playing with one of the best laning ADCs in the league.

On the other hand, we have an ADC who was quite underwhelming for the entire split in Stixxay. While CLG’s AD was one of the best in terms of adjusted KDA, he was also one of the worst when it came to adjusted kill participation (thanks to low KP and kill share numbers). That’s been the case in playoffs as well, as bottom-two in kill participation and kill share (only Arrow is below him).

While Stixxay does get a fair amount of gold funneled to him, my biggest criticism of Stixxay, in both regular split and playoffs, is that he doesn’t do a lot with it. His 493 DPM is in the bottom half of all playoff ADCs and his 26% damage contribution is worst in the role. Similarly, his adjusted DPM during the regular season was bottom-three in the LCS, ahead of only Lost and WildTurtle.

Luckily, Stixxay is paired with the criminally underrated Biofrost. By my estimations, Bio was the second-best support in the LCS this summer, controlling the lane and enabling Stixxay to carry games.

Bio’s numbers in the playoffs compared to this regular split were down quite a bit. However, there was one area where Biofrost improved: vision score. Biofrost has placed more wards per minute than any other LCS support in the playoffs, and has the second-most wards cleared per minute.

Ultimately, the question for this lane is whether Stixxay can stay afloat long enough to let Biofrost get unlocked to support the rest of the team, or if Cody Sun can out-carry his feeding support. I’ll give it to CLG since they’ve had so much success this split playing this very strategy.

Advantage: CLG