JingDong Gaming gain and lose initial leads. They start getting early turrets in side lanes to snowball only to collapse around mid game in major teamfights. As a result, fans have started pointing fingers at side laners, and Kim “Doinb” Taesang, has been called the Soren “Bjergsen” Bjerg of the LPL by his ardent supporters. With 41 percent of his team’s damage averaged after the first week, signs point to him being the most valuable player on the team by a significant margin; the rest of them are letting him down.

But as with anything, it’s rarely that simple.

JingDong have several strategic flaws that make it difficult to win their games. For this article, I’ll focus on a very deliberate aspect of their strategy that often results in their AD carries falling behind.

JingDong’s AD carry role represents a sore spot in the minds of most of their fans. In the past half year, JingDong — previously known as QG Reapers — have gone through five candidates for AD carry and four for support, seemingly dissatisfied with all of them.

But it’s not as straightforward as blaming JD’s revolving rookie bot lane door. The team prioritizes resources to Doinb first, their jungler second, top laner third, and finally their AD carry when they do lane assignments. An underfed AD carry makes it easy to fall behind in 5v5s, especially against teams like LGD Gaming and Oh My God that prioritize their ADCs.

JingDong don’t set up their AD carries for success and in fact often hinder them by failing to optimize resource distribution. If they then can’t succeed, it seems foolish to condemn them and elevate Doinb as the “Bjergsen” of his region.

To see how this happens requires a small amount of knowledge of how minion waves work. Specifically speaking, one must understand the difference between a bouncing wave, a stacking wave, and a crashing wave.

A bouncing wave will reset at the next turret and start building the enemy team’s wave to push back against you. Stacking waves rely on focus fire from your minions to kill one of the enemy minions at a time and build up so that there’s a large wave when it hits the next turret, allowing you to maximize your damage against the structure. A crash simply resets so that all your minions die to the turret before meeting the next opposing wave.

When JingDong group to take early turrets before ten minutes, either in lane swaps or groups to the bottom lane, they often deny their AD carry farm. This happens because they will improperly bounce a wave so it doesn’t push back to their AD carry after he backs and returns to lane. Either that, or they will move their jungler to a side lane to support Doinb in a pick over staying near their ADC.

As a result, when JingDong eventually set up for a 1-3-1 where the ADC and support are supposed to push and defend mid while top and mid side lane to create pressure, the ADC is unable to push against whoever the enemy team sends mid. He’s constantly under turret, missing minions, and having to back, allowing the enemy team to force mid.

To illustrate this specifically, I will highlight JingDong’s first game of the split against LGD Gaming. To start off the chain reaction, the new Kassadin is able to bully most AP mid matchups with a Doran’s Ring and a Dark Seal. Doinb forced back LGD’s Yu “Cool” Jiajun.

View photos Doinb’s Kassadin forces Cool’s Orianna back to start the action (lolesports) More

At this point, JDG’s bot lane was slightly ahead in creeps, but the team had an advantage they chose to abuse by allowing Kim “Clid” Taemin to invade and deny the enemy’s raptors. LGD’s Lim “Jinoo” Jinwoo used his top side advantage to move mid and help Xie “Eimy” Dan defend the mid push, and they succeeded in punishing Clid.

View photos Mid pressure allows Clid to invade Eimy’s raptors, but Eimy and Jinoo collapsed to take him out. (lolesports) More

Story continues