League of Legends LCS: Grading the 2020 team rosters

TSM

Top: Sergen “Broken Blade” Çelik
Jungle: Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett
Mid: Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg
ADC: Kasper “Kobbe” Kobberup
Support: Vincent “Biofrost” Wang
Coach: Zhang “Peter” Yi

TSM had a lot of questions to answer coming into the offseason and, credit to them, they seem to have answered some of them. They managed to keep their star and franchise player, Bjergsen and are continuing to build around him and young top laner Broken Blade. They also made a very smart pick-up in bringing back old face and fan-favorite Biofrost.

Their remaining roster moves, bringing in Kobbe to replace Zven, electing to go with Dardoch as their jungler, and letting Zikz go in favor of Peter as the coach, are all risky and confusing moves. Not that they’re necessarily bad moves, just sort of interesting.

I’ve already gone through why I think Dardoch is going to be a disaster for TSM, but if he actually does manage to reform he could be a massive difference-maker for the team and his more aggressive style should make him at least an upgrade over the Akaadian/Grig/Spica tandem they ran last year. Kobbe is a great ADC, but stylistically he compares very much to the great ADC they just let go, Zven. Both play very conservatively in lane and prefer to make their impact known in team fights, so swapping one for the other is basically TSM gambling that Kobbe’s ceiling could be higher than what they got out of Zven (which was admittedly little). I wonder how effective a TSM iteration with Zven/Biofrost in the bot lane could have been compared to Kobbe.

Finally, Peter Zhang did seem to become the de-facto TSM head coach at the end of the year, supplanting Zikz and making their parting of ways make sense. But Peter took over right as TSM went into their tailspin and never really pulled out of it. It’s fair to wonder if Peter is the right man to lead this new iteration of TSM forward, especially if the underlying organizational problems I previously discussed haven’t been fixed.

I don’t think TSM is one of those teams that will collapse and implode like Evil Geniuses has the potential to do (Dardoch could be the X-factor in that happening, but I sense that TSM will not let it get to that point and have him on a short leash). The talent and synergies should be solid enough to make them a top-three team. The question is whether those little issues will hold them back from their potential to dethrone Team Liquid.

Grade: A-

How does the class fare?

After breaking down all of these teams and their roster moves, it’s clear that the LCS in 2020 will, at least initially, be broken into several tiers of teams. First, the teams that are clearly at the top of the league. Then, the teams in the middle who will tend to be trending upward or downward. Finally, there will be the so-called doormats, so the only question is which teams are where?

The Contenders

Team Liquid
Cloud9

High-Potential

TSM
100 Thieves
CLG

Possible Disasters

Evil Geniuses
Dignitas
Immortals

Bottom Feeders

FlyQuest
Golden Guardians

This is generally how I would rank the rosters for the LCS teams going into 2020. Of course, there is every possibility that some teams will prove me to have underestimated them (TSM and Evil Geniuses would be my guess) or overrated them (Immortals and 100 Thieves). In any case, with the start of the season likely just a few months away, it will be fascinating to see how these teams turn out.