League of Legends: How every LEC team should improve in the offseason

SK Gaming – Mid Lane

SK Gaming scraped their way into playoffs in the Spring Split, finishing 6th after beating Schalke 04 in a tiebreaker, then followed it up by marginally missing out on a place in playoffs in the Summer Split, finishing 7th after losing to Team Vitality in a tiebreaker. What this information tells you is this: 2019 was a very mediocre season for SK Gaming.

SK’s return to top-level European League of Legends started out as exciting as ever, breaking into the playoffs in their first split, and jungler Oskar “Selfmade” Boderek winning a Rookie of the Spring Split award for his contribution to the roster’s success. Nevertheless, the celebrations were short-lived as the team crashed out of playoffs in the first round, then went on to miss out on playoffs completely in the Summer Split.

Following these results, it’s clear that the coaching staff at SK are determined to turn things around and make the necessary offseason changes to allow the organization to challenge the top EU teams in 2020. Selfmade and Juš “Crownshot” Marušič will be integral to this small rebuild as they were the most promising members of a relatively disappointing SK roster in 2019, but the jury remains out for the other three members of the line-up.

Toni “Sacre” Sabalić impressed during SK Prime’s Spring EU Masters run in which they finished 2nd and earned the Croatian a place on SK Gaming’s starting roster, which has led to mixed results. With a large champion pool of both carries and tanks, Sacre has become a reliable top laner for his team, despite not receiving much attention from Selfmade in the early game. His stats have him amongst the middle of the pack when it comes to top laners, and that’s about all you can say about Sacre’s debut split on the LEC stage, but you get the feeling there’s a lot more to come from him.

As for Han “Dreams” Min-Kook, his excellent shot-calling and macro awareness is what led SK to the playoffs with such a young roster back in Spring, but has since been pretty absent from a viewer’s standpoint. Whether this is due to his own decline or the team as a whole remains to be seen, but if he’s to continue in the main shot-caller role, you can only assume SK will look to keep him on the line-up going into 2020.

So, that just leaves one role that SK should look to change/improve in the coming weeks and months – mid lane. Towards the back end of the Summer Split, the coaching staff had already made their intentions known by subbing out experienced mid laner Choi “Pirean” Jun-sik for a rookie that impressed on the Academy roster, Janik “Jenax” Bartels.

With mid lane having such a vital role in the current meta, especially when grouping up with a jungler and roaming around the map, it’s expected that SK Gaming will be looking to find a new player to fit into this role during the offseason. It would come as no surprise if Selfmade had a huge input in this regard as he and the team look to compete with the top European teams next year, who all seem to have a stronger mid-jungle duo than SK Gaming at the moment.