LCS 2021: Ranking Every Single Starting LCS Jungler
By Josh Tyler
1. Robert “Blaber” Huang (FlyQuest)
I don’t think people fully appreciate just how dominant Blaber is when it comes to LCS junglers. I mentioned earlier that the gap between Broxah and Closer was smaller than that between Broxah and Santorin. Well, the difference in ranking between Blaber and Santorin is bigger than the difference between Santorin and Iconic.
That’s not an exaggeration, Blaber is actually just lightyears ahead of all other junglers in the league by every metric. To start, he is the best early game jungler in the LCS by a mile. He posted an 820.5 MAGXD @ 15, almost double the next-closest jungler. And Blaber was often put in jungle matchups that he should expect to win (that was the case in 58.9% of his games in 2020) but he still managed to massively outperform those expectations.
His estimated damage differential is, no surprise, the highest among all junglers at 76.9 last year. He’s one of the few NA junglers who actually outperforms his expected damage on Lee Sin, but he’s no slouch on Gragas or Olaf either.
All three of those junglers were rated as elite in 2020, helping him to have the strongest-rated champion pool among LCS junglers. He can be criticized for having only played 16 unique champions, but that is still above average for his role and the fact that he has so many strong picks in his pool really elevates him.
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His gold per minute (382) laps all other junglers. Yes, that could be attributed to his playing as a part of the Cloud9 monster that tore through everyone up until Summer Playoffs, but the fact that he was so dominant in the early game suggests that a large reason for his high GPM is his own play.
His adjusted KDA is 3.18, the only stat where he didn’t blow past everyone else in the role. But even that “weak” stat is well above average for his role.
Blaber has everything that you could want from a jungler. He’s proactive and wins early game regardless of the jungle matchup, he translates that to strong income throughout the game, and uses that income to produce high damage outputs. Blaber is the best jungler in the LCS and should be among the early favorites for MVP.