Ranking all 24 teams at the League of Legends World Championship
By Josh Tyler
10. Team Liquid
Qualified via
LCS 2019 Summer Champion
Roster
Top – Jung “Impact” Eon-yeong
Jungle – Jake “Xmithie” Puchero
Mid – Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen
ADC – Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng
Support – Jo “CoreJJ” Yong-in
How they got here
By being the most dominant North American team of all time, duh. In seriousness, though, 2019 has been a dream year for Liquid, as they kicked things off by winning the LCS Championship in spring thanks to a reverse sweep over their rivals TSM.
This secured them a berth at MSI where their performance was…uneven to say the least. They may have finished in second place, capped by a series win over the defending World Champions Invictus, but they also got curb-stomped in the finals by G2 and nearly missed making the knockout round with some struggles in the group stage.
Back in the friendly confines of NA, though, TL returned to dominance, finishing with the best record in the LCS. However, they struggled to beat sixth-seeded Clutch in the semifinals before taking down Cloud9 in a five-game series.
Player to watch
CoreJJ, who would have been the LCS MVP if he wasn’t also on a team with two other players (Doublelift and Impact) who could credibly make the case for the award as well.
Best case scenario
If Liquid can avoid a Group of Death scenario, they should make it out of groups with ease, likely as a first seed. That would enable them to have a decent matchup in the quarterfinals and make it to semifinals. However, once they make semis they would need a big miracle to advance further, as they’ll be massively outclassed by most of the top teams at the World Championship.
Worst case scenario
If Liquid doesn’t make it out of groups, they would consider this whole season a failure. Worst case is they get the dreaded Group of Death and don’t make it out of groups.
Prediction
TL has the talent to make it fairly deep in this tournament. For some reason, though, I keep getting the feeling that their success has come thanks to other teams failing more than them succeeding. I see them getting outplayed by some more aggressive teams, having issues coming back in games where they can’t stomp their enemy in lane, and individual errors dooming the team, preventing them from making it out of groups.