LCS Spring Split 2020: Week 7 Player Power Ranking

Jungle

1. Robert “Blaber” Huang (Cloud9)
2. William “Meteos” Hartman (100 Thieves)
3. Matthew “Akaadian” Higginbotham (Dignitas)

In his 2020 debut, Akaadian actually played quite well, but it wasn’t enough to lift Dignitas to a win over either Golden Guardians or 100 Thieves. That’s certainly not ideal, but Akaadian did show his early-game prowess in the game against a very good jungler in Meteos. He finished that game 7/2/3 and jumped out to a near 1200 gold and over 800 XP lead at the 10-minute mark over the veteran.

4. Raymond “Wiggily” Griffin (CLG)
5. Lucas “Santorin” Tao Kilmer Larsen (FlyQuest)
6. Jake “Xmithie” Puchero (Immortals)

I can’t imagine how Xmithie must have felt last week when he took down his former team (at full strength) to push Liquid to the brink of them missing playoffs one split after dumping him for Broxah. In that revenge game, Xmithie went 3/0/6 on Gragas.

It’s important to note that, although Xmithie has been one of the worst junglers in terms of gold difference at 15 minutes (-148), he is also the jungler with the highest forward percentage at that time. In short, Xmithie is playing aggressively early to give cover and support to his laners, sacrificing his own gold and farm.

7. Shern “Shernfire” Cherng Tai (Team Liquid)
8. Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett (TSM)
9. Can “Closer” Çelik (Golden Guardians)

A few things continue to greatly bother/perplex me about Closer this split. First and foremost, he has one of the worst XP differentials after the early game (at the 15-minute mark) and the third-lowest adjusted DPMs of any jungler despite having one of the highest jungle forward percentages. This indicates to me that Closer is an aggressive jungler, sacrificing early farm and XP for lane pressure, which gets him those early gold leads, but he can’t snowball that into mid and late game advantages.

More concerning, though, Closer is the worst LCS jungler in terms of vision score per minute. Given how important vision control is for a jungler and the fact that they currently have the worst dragon control of any LCS team, I’m skeptical to call him a fantastic jungler like so many others when he hasn’t improved at a key aspect of his role. One only needs to look at the top junglers by vision score per minute (Meteos, Xmithie, Blaber, Svenskeren) to see how crucial this skill is and why it’s such a big deal.

10. Mads “Broxah” Brock-Pedersen (Team Liquid)
11. Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen (Evil Geniuses)
12. Jonathan “Grig” Armao (Dignitas)