Joe’s 3 takeaways: Week 2, Day 1 of the NA LCS
So the biggest news of the day came from Echo Fox’s forfeit of Saturday’s North American League of Legends Championship Series because of ineligible players, the result of an inexplicable lapse by Riot Games. Alas, the rest of the games had to go on. Here are the major takeaways:
The pieces are falling in place for TSM
Despite the loss today, things are looking up for TSM. Keeping in mind it was playing possibly the best NA team, Immortals, TSM showed a lot of promise. Immortals had a good early start to today’s game, but TSM had much better plays in the mid game. TSM made a blunder by throwing its lead trying to kill Baron, but everything else looked a lot better than the past few games.
Stop picking shen
Shen repeatedly looked like a bad pick today. Teams were not utilizing his global map pressure when the enemy top laner didn’t have teleport. Once Shen’s ultimate becomes useless, his split pushing gets totally eclipsed by much better picks (like Fiora). If a top laner cannot go head to head with the enemy top laner in a split push scenario, it might as well surrender. I hope Shen will start being abandoned as a top lane pick.
Playoff spots are going to be highly contested in NA
Immortals looks like it’ll easily be at the top of the standings, but the other teams fighting to get into the playoffs are going to be close. It’s only Week 2, but if things continue as they are, a single game could easily make the difference when playoffs roll around.
Joe “Pistallion” Cannavino is a staff writer for Slingshot Esports and a diamond-level League of Legends player. Contact him at joec@slingshotesports.com.
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