League of Legends LEC playoff preview: is there a chance for Schalke?

Jungle

Kim “Trick” Gang-yun vs Mads “Broxah” Brock-Pedersen

Just on name recognition, most spectators would assume that this would be a match-up of two masters of the jungle. Unfortunately, the stats don’t quite bear that out. Broxah and Trick have struggled mightily this summer, posting some of the worst early-game stats (gold, experience, and CS differentials at 10) and some of the worst vision control of any jungler in the LEC.

For his part, Broxah actually had the worst kill participation (raw and adjusted) among all junglers, which is quite distressing. Since Broxah isn’t getting a lead through farming or vision control early, the fact that he’s not able to help snowball his lanes indicates he’s not pathing effectively or helping secure objectives and team fights.

Broxah is also fairly limited in terms of his playstyle. He seems to gravitate towards early game junglers like Lee Sin, Elise, and Gragas (his three most-played champs in the regular season and playoffs) but abhors defensive junglers. He has played zero games on Sejuani or Skarner this split or in the playoffs.

As badly as Broxah has done this summer, Trick has somehow been worse. Despite having one of the best adjusted KDAs of all LEC junglers, Trick had some of the lowest damage, vision, and laning numbers. Luckily, Trick does have the diversity of jungle champions in his repertoire, including Sejuani, Skarner, Qiyana, and Xin Zhao.

While Trick has a lot of advantages going for him and Broxah has been on the downswing this summer, I still give Broxah the advantage in this matchup. Trick straight-up lags behind Broxah in all areas other than KDA.

Advantage: Fnatic