LCS: Doublelift Bashed NA’s Mindset So Here’s 5 Ways Teams Can Fix It

3. Be Willing to Bench Players

In his discussion with Doublelift, Nick “LS” De Cesare mentioned that in Korea part of the reason that players are so driven is that they know that if they underperform they will be benched for another young, hungry player behind them on the depth chart. Yet there are, according to these reports, many players who are content to just get their paycheck, play scrims, play on stage, and not really care how well their team does. This needs to stop.

Teams need to take a stronger stance on players who are not setting their team up for success and be willing to bench their starters for Academy players or even players from their third team like 100 Thieves Next. Obviously, this also requires teams to devote more resources to their Academy and amateur teams, something that was a focus of the offseason and clearly has not happened. Part of the solution should be to also take this hard stance for their Academy teams.

We saw last year that Team Liquid did this with Doublelift, who came back and was a more improved player. This also worked a few years ago for Cloud9, when they elected to bench star mid laner Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen and ADC Zachary “Sneaky” Scuderi.

Obviously, teams are already willing to make this call, but I think there is some other way to make the sting of being benched hurt even more.

You see, in some leagues like the MLB and NHL, players salaries are structured differently if they are playing on the pro teams or the minor league team. That is to say, they’ll get $X every day they’re on the main roster, but a lower amount every day they’re sent to the minors. LCS teams should adopt this for contracts going forward, so getting sent down to Academy can be more than just a show of strength but actually hurt players in their wallets.