Team Liquid (TL) is currently second to last place in the North American LCS (4W-12L) for the 2017 Spring Split, but were their attempts to recover from their worst season to date worth the trouble?

Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng joins Team Liquid for their last three weeks in the NA LCS Spring Split.

Nothing has tested a professional team’s patience and adaptability more than Team Liquid’s player shuffle this past spring. After only one week with ADC Jung “Youngbin” Young-bin, they decided that they needed to make even more changes. TL actually made a desperate attempt to sign retired pro-gamer Michael “Imaqtpie” Santana, as most of their options either had no LCS experience or were already signed.

Imaqtpie, who was awarded 2016 Streamer of the Year, would have brought an enormous amount of knowledge to the team. However, his response, “Don’t you disrespect me by asking me to join your tenth place, garbage-ass team,” showed just how much he was willing to help, as well as how strange it was for TL to ask a full-time streamer to play for a professional team.

Adjusting To Doublelift

So, Team Liquid went to their next option: Doublelift. Since their announcement on Facebook two weeks ago that ADC main Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng would be joining their roster, TL has only been able to win 1 out of 4 of their series, and that one victory was against current last place team Team Envy, so it doesn’t say much in terms of results.

TL should have catered picks and bans to their superstar ADC, but Doublelift was pretty much helpless for the first few games as he was still in “solo-queue mode” and had only played with them one day prior. Not only that, Doublelift is also pretty much set on returning to TSM for the summer, which will cause yet another roster change for TL in the near future.

For example, when asked about his interesting Draven pick against Cloud9, Doublelift said,

“I have only been playing with TL for a day, so my champion pool is still solo-queue champion pool… I just needed a safe AD carry versus their triple dive, and there’s just nothing. Honestly nothing. It was either Jhin or Draven. They banned or took all the safe AD carries — like, they took Ezreal and banned the others, so I felt like I gotta play Draven, I guess, and hope for the best.”

Doublelift wasn’t able to carry his team to victory this past weekend against Phoenix1 and Team Dignitas either, which eliminated TL from a chance at the play-offs.

Team Liquid Roster Changes Doing More Harm Than Good?

Team Liquid’s “we won’t know until we try” attitude is great, but it comes with a price. Why did it seem like they didn’t start taking things seriously until halfway through the split? TL’s culture was a little too relaxed in terms of deciding when and how to improve their gameplay, and when they finally did decide to make a big change, it was too late.

Their continuously poor performance in the later half of the split stems from too much wasted time experimenting with their player composition. The Piglet to “Midlet” switch made sense, but the snowballing of even more player changes within a short time frame is what kept them in the bottom. You can’t just play Fantasy Football with the players on your LCS team and expect everyone to perform well.

In addition to signing skilled players, every professional team has to consider their players’ synergy with each other, coaching and practice styles that work best for their players, and then stay up to date with all of the other teams in order to remain a competitive threat. Team-bonding activities like taking a cooking class is great, but is there enough time to take the new team to painting classes each week if you need to work on practicing a new role or with a new player? Every week, Team Liquid was faced with a different opposing team than the week before, but they also had to work with a different home team almost each week since Week 5, which proved too difficult to juggle.

Doublelift Discusses Major Issues for TL

While discussing his experience with the team, Doublelift highlighted 3 main problems he thinks TL is currently facing:

“The first one, they probably didn’t have good shot-calling before I came in. I don’t even think my shot-calling right now is very good. … Their vision game doesn’t exist, and that was very apparent against C9 when we just had, like, no vision and [C9] were just walking everywhere and taking over the map. That’s number two, and I think that might even be the most important one.” “And then, lastly, I feel like everyone on Team Liquid, because they haven’t been doing well and having good results, they don’t play with their teammates. And I don’t think it’s like, ‘I don’t trust this guy to play this well.’ It’s [more] like they don’t consider their teammates are tools for them to use. … So having that eye for team play is also completely missing from Team Liquid, so I think if I can fix that, if everyone can have the same eye as me when I look for plays and if I can fix the vision game, that’s going to be the big turning point for TL.”

Creating a good team dynamic is not something that can just happen overnight, but if the LCS veteran can guide Team Liquid, they have only one week left to prove themselves.

2017 NA LCS Spring Split statistics as of the end of Week 8.

Preparing for the Future

With only two series left, what is best- and worst-case scenario for Team Liquid? They need to stay out of the bottom two teams in order to avoid being relegated. If Echo Fox (5W-11L) wins their last two games, Team Liquid will be out of the NA LCS. If Echo Fox suffers defeat for both games, TL will be safe as long as they can win both of theirs, against #1 team TSM and #6 team FlyQuest.

Defeating TSM resembles something close to a miracle, but it would be amazing to see them win big and crawl out from the bottom of the standings in their last two series. Being a Team Liquid fan is exhausting, but even if they don’t end up with a victory, fans should be happy to see them at least play well together and not go down without a fight.

Team Liquid should learn from Doublelift’s observations, but they also need to work on finding a niche for each player without Doublelift as their ADC, in preparation for the summer and beyond. They have a lot of work cut out for them, but they have the potential to step up and learn from this experience. In the end, I think it was necessary for Team Liquid to make the choices that they did in order for them to start seeing the bigger picture.

Be sure to check out Team Liquid’s last two series with Doublelift this Saturday at 2 p.m. CST as they play against Doublelift’s former and (most likely future) team, Team SoloMid, and this Sunday at 5 p.m. CST against FlyQuest. Follow Team Liquid through the NA LCS in their Liquid LoL SQUAD series here (highly recommended!).