Phoenix1 came into Summer Split as the third place team from Spring. They had an MVP player in ADC No “Arrow” Dong-hyeon with solid pieces around him. Many expected them to still be strong contenders in the North American LCS, but two weeks in and they’re lone wolves at the bottom with an 0-4 record.

What exactly happened in between splits? For the most part it feels like the team has stagnated a bit, while the rest of the teams around them have gotten better. A few minor roster changes from last split seemed to have carried over as the team just does not look to be meshing well.

Is it time to bench inori?

Many of P1’s problems arose last split before jungler, Rami “Inori” Charagh, took a leave of absence from the team to deal with personal issues. News then arose that him and support Adrian “Adrian” Ma were bringing much tension to the team with chemistry. Adrian took shots at Inori in an LCS interview basically saying how Meteos was a smarter jungler overall. Inori returned to the team and looked much improved after his break. With the transfer of Adrian to Team Liquid, Inori no longer has the personal issues on the team that he had before.

Inori has looked shaky to start off the split. He’s near the bottom in just about every jungle statistic. He’s known to let his emotions dictate his game play. With Phoenix1 struggling to find their first win, he may be tilting a bit to start off the season. The team overall hasn’t looked very proactive at all, as most of their games have been straight up stomps.

In P1’s last match against Cloud 9, he was subbed out in favor of William “Meteos” Hartman. With Meteos, the team looked a lot more competitive. With the jungle meta shifting away from the carry junglers, Inori’s time could be up on Phoenix1.

If the team wants to move on, they’ll need to find a long term jungler that they can develop. Meteos has voiced that he doesn’t want to be with P1 long term and was only there as a temporary fix. If they can’t find someone else soon, they could be facing relegations.

Was Shady the Right choice at support?

When Adrian was transferred to Team Liquid, P1 brought on Dignitas sub, William “Stunt” Chen, to be the starting support. The team found much success with Stunt on the roster. He seemed to fit well with the team near the end of the season and first round of playoffs. Yet when it came to semifinals, Phoenix1 decided to go with a brand new rookie support in Jordan “Shady” Robison.

With Shady, the team never really looked quite as good. We’ll never know what happens in practice or scrims, but it felt that Stunt was the better option just looking at how the team plays on stage. Individually Shady isn’t blowing any stats out of the water, looking average at best. Maybe having a seven man roster with Stunt would have been the better option.

Peaked

Perhaps 3rd place was the best Phoenix1 could possibly do as a roster. Arrow hasn’t looked like the MVP from last split. Their early game seems a lot less proactive and more reactive to other teams. This team looked poised for another split of success, but have started off rocky. How they bounce back after rough 0-2 back to back weeks will be huge in how they perform the rest of this split.

As other teams have shown improvement over the offseason, Phoenix1 has looked worse. With rift rivals just weeks away, they’ll need to show a lot of improvement if they want to represent North America well in a huge international rivalry.

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Cover Photo by Riot Esports