After fighting tooth and nail for a victory against Golden Guardians, TSM were handed a beating by OpTic Gaming to knock themselves into a tie for fourth place. The team's onstage performances have looked worse than their record, and they're running out of time to turn things around.





TSM at times look like one of the worst teams in the LCS. The players are capable and gifted, and we've seen moments of greatness and decisiveness from them in some games, but they've struggled to consistently translate that into any semblance of real team cohesion in their on stage performances.





The team has two glaring weaknesses. The first being their bot lane's recent difficulties coming out even or ahead in 2v2's, thus sabotaging their usual scaling condition. The second is their frequent mechanical mistakes. TSM often look for plays down bot, only to have them blow up in their face due to mis-juggled turret aggro, missed abilities, or an enemy outplay.





Following Rift Rivals, TSM committed themselves to applying what they learned at the tournament to their style of play. This strategy produced mixed results: a loss against CLG with Gragas/Yasuo bot lane, a win against Clutch Gaming with Azir top, and another loss against Cloud9 with Rumble mid.





Win or lose, their willingness to experiment was a good sign for TSM, a team that finds comfort in late game scaling compositions. They even pulled off arguably their best early game of the entire split against C9 before throwing their lead.





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In order to rack up wins in week seven, TSM opted to draft comfort picks: a strong top side like Camille and Sejuani, with scaling mid and bot lane carries like Corki, Azir, Sivir, and Ezreal.





"Once you lose cuz you aren't good enough, you go back to what works without being good," Zven said in an interview after TSM's win over GGS. "Our comp is not hard to play, but it works in NA LCS."





Week seven was supposed to be crunch time for TSM. They've been to the drawing board and decided to go with "what works" to increase their chances of winning. Problems arise, though, when "what works" fails to win you games, or barely pushes you across the finish line.





Right now, TSM's default play-style is too reliant on enemy mistakes. Despite their slow start in the Spring Split, TSM quickly became known for their proactive early game and stellar ability to play around Matthew "Akaadian" Higginbotham to push their solo lane leads. Between going from two junglers to locking Akaadian into the starting lineup so late into the split, TSM haven't been able to establish any sort of play-style.





TSM now find themselves tied with OpTic for fourth above a three-way tie for sixth place between Clutch Gaming, GGS, and 100 Thieves. With four playoff-worthy teams nipping at their heels and a reasonably strong schedule against Team Liquid, 100 Thieves, Echo Fox, and FlyQuest, losing a single game could be dire for TSM's post-season aspirations.