Rising star. Prodigy. The next Faker. Pick your hyperbole: someone has probably said it about CJ Entus’ 17-year-old mid laner, Bdd.

CJ fans who eagerly awaited Bdd’s arrival mid-split were rewarded with four consecutive series wins. With Bdd on board, CJ twice defeated Kongdoo Monster 2-1 and then knocked off SBENU Sonicboom 2-1 and Samsung Galaxy 2-0, prompting reserved but optimistic praise. As the end of the spring season approached, the prevailing sentiment was that Bdd had improved the team.

But did Bdd really make CJ Entus better? It’s a big question that requires a thorough response.

We’ve seen a full round robin from Bdd, enough to draw a comparison between CJ Entus’ pre- and post-Bdd incarnations, and the numbers might surprise some fans: if Bdd did inspire improvements, they didn't show up in measurable ways.

Head-to-Head: Bdd vs. Sky

We'll start by measuring Sky's and Bdd's individual performances. On most indicators, Bdd outperformed Sky, but not by that much (other than Bdd’s much higher kill participation, but KP is a team play style stat, not necessarily a "higher is better" stat).

Statistic Sky Bdd KDA 2.8 3.0 Kill Participation 69.8% 83.6% Death Share 23.0% 21.2% Damage per Minute 462 498 Damage Share 25.9% 27.8% Gold Share 23.7% 23.0% CSD@10 -2.8 -1.8 CS per Minute 8.7 8.1

Sky was one of the weakest mid laners in the LCK over the first half of the split, so Bdd's numbers are actually not very impressive. Our question for now, though, is whether Bdd was better than Sky, or rather, whether he made CJ Entus better as a team.

At first blush, we do have some small positives: Bdd was involved in much more of CJ Entus' fights, died a bit less often, and dealt more damage, while working with a bit less of the team's gold. His laning stats were also a hair better than Sky's, though still poor.

On the downside, Bdd picked up a lot less farm throughout his games: in fact, Bdd's CS per minute was the lowest of any LCK mid laner. His CS numbers are even more surprising when we add in the context that Bdd played more than half of his games on hold-mid/wave-clear champions like Azir (7), Varus (3), and Viktor (2). (For what it’s worth, those champions also help explain the small damage advantage Bdd had over Sky, who spent less time on high-damage champions despite a handful of games on Corki and Viktor.)

Sky and Bdd showed different weaknesses in their play. Sky was an easy target too much of the time, with occasional but inconsistent playmaking. Bdd made fewer errors than Sky, and his positive contributions to team plays were certainly more frequent and noticeable, but he struggled with timing and confidence, waiting for opportunities to come to him rather than looking for ways to assert himself.

Altogether, there's little question that Bdd is a better player, and he definitely looked like a stronger mid laner based on the eye test — but as the stats show, he didn't play that much better. Of course, Bdd’s individual skill is only part of the hypothesis that he made CJ Entus a better team, so let’s take a look at the team’s overall stats.

Outcomes

Team performance is about more than wins and losses. In addition to game and series records, we should take into account the difference in gold spent between CJ and their opponents, to get a sense of the margins that they won or lost by, as well as their early and mid-to-late game ratings, to see how they performed over the different phases of the game.

Statistic With Sky With Bdd Record (series / games) 4-5 / 10-14 4-5 / 9-13 Win Percentage 41.7% 40.9% Gold Spent Percentage Difference -3.9% -5.8% Early Game Rating 41.0 36.7 Mid/Late Rating 0.7 4.2

At the most basic level, it's clear Bdd's arrival did not produce better results for CJ, at least statistically. Playing with Bdd, the team had the same series win-loss record as in their first round robin, but they had fewer individual game wins, worse gold margins, an even weaker early game and only slight improvements to their mid-to-late game.

CJ Entus played fewer Game 3s with Bdd, though their Game 3 record stayed strong: they were 4-2 in Game 3s with Sky in the first round robin, and 3-1 in Game 3s with Bdd. One way to look at this, though, is that CJ only won a series 2-0 a single time all split; all seven of their other series wins took a full three games.

Combat

To find out where the wins and losses came from, let’s take a closer look at some aspects of how the team played, specifically in terms of combat and objectives.

Fights and kills are rarer in the LCK than in any other major league around the world, so a strong performance in each and every fight is crucial to success. With Bdd, CJ Entus’ combat outcomes were worse, and there were some changes to the situations they fought in.

Statistic With Sky With Bdd Kill-to-Death Ratio 0.92 0.77 Assists per Kill 2.56 2.91 Combined Kills per Minute 0.54 0.52

A common CJ narrative, especially after Bdd’s arrival, is that they prefer to play a slow game and look for 5v5 team fights. The team’s average assists per kill bears that out: their APK grew from 2.56 to 2.91 after Bdd started, and the kill pacing of their games decreased slightly. But given the big drop in CJ’s kill-to-death ratio, it’s clear this approach has produced pretty poor results.

With Sky, CJ seemed to find more skirmishes, sometimes through Sky’s roaming on champions like Twisted Fate, but often without the mid laner present (evidenced by his low kill participation). With Bdd, every fight seemed like a 5v5. That’s partly because CJ doesn’t favor solo plays and roaming generally, and partly because Bdd seemed hesitant to get of his lane and look for a play, even on champions like LeBlanc and Lissandra, unless the team had set something up. Though it might look like the play of a rookie lacking confidence, everyone on CJ Entus shares in the blame for a lack of proactive play.

When it did come to the 5v5 fighting, Bdd rarely looked weak, and made relatively few mistakes with his positioning and movement. As with his roaming, though, he was often too tentative, holding his Azir ultimates too long or hesitating before diving in as Lissandra and missing opportunities to make a high-impact play. More confidence might have helped CJ increase their tempo and win more fights.

Objectives

A controlled, objective-focused strategy can be effective without necessarily relying on kills, as Korean teams have shown time and again. So, how did CJ Entus do with objective control after Bdd arrived?

It seems they didn’t do especially well. In the second round robin, CJ secured fewer dragons and Barons, and their already-abysmal early tower control plummeted to a new low.

Statistic With Sky With Bdd Dragon Control 42% 37% Rift Herald Control 42% 44% Baron Control 55% 45% First to Kill Three Towers 25% 14% First to Kill Mid Outer Tower 29% 23%

We saw CJ Entus’ 36.7 early-game rating with Bdd earlier, and these tower stats are a big factor. With Bdd, CJ were the first team to take down three towers in just three of their twenty-two games. I believe the scientific term for that is “really bad.”

Stalling to the late game has become a frequent feature of CJ’s games with Bdd, which means dragon stacking should be much more important — but the team hasn’t been able to execute on that win condition.

We’ll throw them a bone for grabbing one or two extra Rift Heralds. Good job, guys.

The Verdict

Did Bdd make CJ Entus a better team? The results all point to no.

Is Bdd to blame for his team’s lack of results? That’s a different question.

My tone has been pretty critical throughout this article; I’ve gone where the numbers have led me. But we also have to take into account outside factors like meta changes, improvements by CJ Entus’ opponents and opportunities for those opponents to identify and plan against CJ’s Kramer-centric playstyle.

This last point is especially important. Through the first round robin, CJ relied on Kramer’s hard-carry performances, in part because Sky was unreliable and couldn’t take on more of that role himself. With Bdd, there was an opportunity to shift the team’s center of gravity away from Kramer — but that didn’t really happen. With Sky, Kramer did 33.5% of CJ's damage, and with Bdd that only shrank slightly, to 32.8%. By the time Bdd arrived, CJ’s opponents had more than two months of scouting information about how important Kramer was to CJ’s success, and they didn’t throw much of a curveball.

There’s plenty of blame to share around for CJ Entus. We can point fingers at both the coaches and the players for failing to evolve the team’s style, or at their jungler, Bubbling, who was especially underwhelming all split long, or yes, at Bdd, for failing to find the assertive edge CJ needed from him. Bdd is no Faker — not yet, at least.

But there’s lots of time ahead for Bdd to grow and improve, perhaps following a similar arc to Cloud9’s Jensen, who also faced inflated expectations in his rookie split but simply needed more time to develop his confidence. If Bdd and his coaching staff use the midseason break wisely, there’s a good chance we’ll see a more influential Bdd this summer, and that would lead to a better CJ Entus team.

But would growth for Bdd be enough to bring CJ Entus into the summer playoffs? Probably not. At the end of the day, the improvements Bdd needs to make to his individual play are not as big as the improvements CJ Entus needs to make to their overall roster and playstyle.

Note: All statistics presented reflect the 2016 Spring Split regular season. Definitions can be found at OraclesElixir.com/definitions.

Tim "Magic" Sevenhuysen runs OraclesElixir.com, the premier source for League of Legends esports statistics. You can find him on Twitter, unless he’s busy giving one of his three sons a shoulder ride.