LCS 2021: Ranking Every Single Starting LCS Jungler
By Josh Tyler
Let’s rank every one of the ten LCS junglers who will be on the starting roster this year.
Every year, it seems that the jungle role has the most movement of any role. Heading into this season, only two of the ten jungle roles are filled by the player who was the team’s starting jungler at the beginning of 2020 – Svenskeren for Evil Geniuses and Blaber for Cloud9. After all this roster shuffling, though, it still remains to be seen who came out on top.
Just like we did with top laners, we are going to do a deep dive into the jungle role, basing a player’s ranking on the four key metrics that correlate to a team’s success, along with individual performance.
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- Adjusted KDA (aKDA) – calculated like regular KDA but weighing solo kills higher and assists lower
- Gold Per Minute (GPM)
- Estimated Damage Differential (EDD) – the difference between a player’s damage output on a given champion and that of the average player on the same champion
- Matchup Adjusted Gold Plus Experience Differential at 15 (MAGXD @ 15) – what it sounds like, the gold plus experience differential at 15 minutes, accounting for the lane matchups that a player has faced
- Champion Pool Strength – measuring a player’s champion pool by the number of unique picks they played last year and the number that they played above average.
10. Ethan “Iconic” Wilkinson (Golden Guardians)
Along with his fellow Golden Guardians (and former Maryville) teammate, Iconic represents the great hope that the next wave of North American talent can develop in the college ranks. Iconic is ranked last not because he played poorly in the college league, but because he still has to prove his level of play can translate to the LCS stage.
Let’s start with Iconic’s champion pool, which was right around the average size (15 unique champions picked in 2020), but he had high enough performances to be graded as potentially elite on four picks: Graves, Kindred, Trundle, and Nidalee. That core pool is not only wide, but it’s also unique. Iconic is the only jungler who put in a significant amount of games on Kindred last year.
For the other stats, Iconic proved to be a very capable player. His 378 gold per minute would be second-best among LCS junglers, while his 3.45 aKDA would be fourth. He is going to have to clean up his high death count (2.5 per game which is slightly above average) and he is going to face growing pains in his first LCS split.