2022 LCS Playoffs: Evil Geniuses Sweep Team Liquid

Well, my prediction didn’t go as planned as Evil Geniuses sweep Team Liquid off the floor in the Loser’s Bracket Finals. Team Liquid continued to show off their early game dominance versus the young guns in the first two out of three games, establishing gold leads with good laning and intelligent skirmishing. However, I was quite disappointed in their late game calling, and they forked over many kills to the Evil Geniuses in the mid game transitions.

The biggest proponent of these throws was Hans Sama. The general consensus coming into this match was that Hans Sama was a top three bot laner within the LCS. While I think that’s true, you probably did not watch any LEC last split if you think he is playing anywhere near as well as he was during his tenure on Rogue. The monster that almost single-handedly beat the Worlds Finalists in Groups last year is nowhere to be seen as Hans Sama’s teamfighting has drastically dropped off this split. He was uncharacteristically being caught out in tight positions and died multiple times with Flash still up on his champion. Even when Team Liquid played a heavy bot-centric draft, a style which I thought was perfect for this team given their versatility, Hans was simply getting killed off by Inspired’s Diana while he still had Flash available. It was exceedingly disappointing from a man who was largely touted as one of the best ADCs in the world just a few months ago. Guess he’s learning how hard it is to stay in form when you play in North America!

EG definitely showed up a lot in this series with their draft picks and their powerful teamfighting ability, but I still think 100T will marginally take the championship over them. While Inspired has been simply wonderful in EG’s lower bracket run, he is up against the reigning Finals MVP in Closer and I don’t think EG will be able to triumph King Closer three games out of five.

100T in 5.