100 Thieves are an interesting team to look at. So far, they’ve lost to the likes of DIG in lock-in but managed to topple TL yesterday making them a wildly consistent team. At least that’s what the stats say. We could point out that Abbedage’s worst champion during lock-in was Syndra (33% winrate), but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the lack of games played overall. We could also talk about 100T’s stellar performance versus TL yesterday, where ADC FBI had 37% damage share while support Huhi finished with 61% kill participation. Our analysts want to emphasize that the numbers are meaningless without the context behind them. In lock-in, 100T drafts just didn’t fit their style; they drafted enchanter supports with Viego jungle and were unable to find their footing in the early game. Abbedage’s performance on Syndra had less to do with his ability to pilot the champion and more to do with the early game struggles they continue to have. In our opinion, 100T have become the benchmark for NA, in the sense that they should beat worse teams, but struggle against the best. Until they show us differently, 100T are either unleashed or chained by the support meta to patch their early game in the form of Huhi, and have found little success shying away from this tactic. We hope they’re able to develop a stronger identity, but we want to see more front-to-back drafts with Huhi on an engage support.
CLG struggled yesterday in their game against FlyQuest, mainly due to the unexpected Janna top strategy they pulled out. In particular, Contractz looked lost throughout the game and couldn’t find a way into the game. To their credit however, they managed to find openings to punish FlyQuest, but ultimately blundered their way to a loss. We like that they didn’t just roll over and die, but we also don’t think they’re as LCS-ready as we’d hoped.
Prediction: 100 Thieves are still the better team, and look to replicate their success from the previous day through strong front-to-back drafts. We think if 100T manage to weather the storm early, their macro as well as strong individual play should get them over the line.