​A Team SoloMid and Team Liquid rivalry was born the day that TSM dropped Yiliang "Doublelift" Peng and Team Liquid picked him up. During the Spring 2018 split, both teams beat one another during the regular season, with TSM getting a lead in the rivalry after the tiebreaker match.

In the ​most recent set, Team Liquid beat TSM pretty badly, which begs the question: why did TSM lose? Well, its loss can be broken down into three different parts: a poor draft, early game passiveness, and bad plays.





TSM picked up Aatrox, Olaf, Lulu, Ezreal, and Rakan. Team Liquid got Renekton, Sejuani, Irelia, Kai'Sa, and Morgana. Automatically, it can be seen that Team Liquid had the advantageous composition.





Team Liquid's comp had a clear goal. It could win early game and use its single target lockdowns to get picks or team fight engages. Renekton W, Sejuani E and ultimate, Irelia E and ultimate, and Morgana Q and ultimate, all provide single target lockdown. Compared to this, TSM had almost no lockdown.





A weak matchup like this should have been avoided in the drafting phase, but TSM failed to do so.

Looking at each lane individually will help break down this passive, lackluster early game from TSM that secured its loss.

TSM's bot lane played way too cocky. Jesper "Zven" Svenningsen blew his flash before the first wave of minions even crashed. He tried to poke and harass Doublelift and paid the price.





Alfonso "Mithy" Aguirre Rodríguez also underestimated the Team Liquid bot lane damage. He gave first blood and had a few other misplays. Both bot laners should have recognized that they did not have lane priority.





In the top lane, Kevin " Hauntzer " Yarnell was shoved in from level two. Renekton is a strong pick into Aatrox. The Olaf pick for TSM should have helped alleviate pressure in the top lane, but that didn't happen.





Lastly, Lulu mid was supposed to shove and keep Irelia in lane. That happened for the first five minutes, but after that no longer.





Beyond the bad lanes, there were two plays that hurt TSM -- one made by Team Liquid and one made by TSM.

The first was Team Liquid's roam top to kill Hauntzer. TSM had vision on both Sejuani and Irelia heading to the top lane. With its topside jungler being dark, it should have recognized this as a potential three-man dive and sent Hauntzer back to base.





Instead, Hauntzer stayed in lane and retreated too late. And the prowess of the Renekton, Sejuani, and Irelia lockdown is shown. Even though Hauntzer flashes away, he still dies.





TSM lost top lane priority for a long time, and the sad part was that had Olaf not been playing so passive, this play could have been prevented. In fact, all of TSM's topside champions were playing so passive leading up to this that just one gank or aggressive move would have prevented this.

Speaking of Olaf wasting time, TSM let Olaf prioritize mid lane way too much, which is the second bad "play." There were multiple instances of Olaf sitting in a mid lane brush just waiting for something to happen. It is very unlikely for Olaf and Lulu to kill an Irelia.





And even though bot and top lane were losing, there were still kill potentials there because Team Liquid was so shoved.





Lastly on this point, getting Lulu ahead was not TSM's win condition. Its win condition was getting the ​Aatrox ahead to only be further buffed by Lulu, or getting Ezreal ahead for the poke power.

.@TeamLiquidLoL find the fight, take the Baron, and run it down mid for the victory against @TSM! #NALCS pic.twitter.com/qvO5vdmOTI — lolesports (@lolesports) June 24, 2018

Even though the gold difference was not too crazy, Team Liquid was just far enough ahead that its better team comp won it the last team fight.





TSM needs to learn from these mistakes. With ​League of Legends games averaging 23-27 minutes, TSM needs to get more proactive early if it hopes to have a chance at the Summer 2018 title and a trip to ​Worlds.





Photos courtesy of Riot Games and LoL Esports Flickr