0 - tl;dr

Skip to section 5.1 for the overall power rankings and section 5.2 for team-specific reviews!

1 - Introduction

Following the end of Worlds 2017 and the announcement of franchising in the NA LCS, there has been an introduction of five new teams and a massive roster shuffle in the offseason. The biggest topic before the split starts is how well these teams will perform with such drastic changes to existing lineups and new lineups. With all the Reddit/Professional analysts voicing their opinions based on gut instincts and industry point-of-view, I thought it’d be interesting to develop specific scores for each player and team to see how well my statistical approach to power rankings stack in comparison.

2 - Goals

We will be attempting to calculate an unbiased numeric value to represent each player’s individual performance during the split to predict the strengths of the teams in the NA LCS after the massive roster shuffle.

3 - Methodology

We will be gathering player statistics based on individual game results, rather than by the winner of the best of three. That way we can look at each game independently and increase our sample size, as well. Dataset used can be found at: http://oracleselixir.com/ In an effort to create both a uniform and unbiased way of representing each player, we will normalize player statistics based on the entire set of North American LCS players by role. Once normalized, an index score will be created based on selected performance metrics (i.e. kill participation, wards placed) that will not result in collinearity (i.e. using percent gold share vs total gold). Once the index score has been calculated we’ll proceed to sort each player into their respective teams, and average the player index scores to determine an overall team score.

4 - Caveats

There are five roles within the game and it’ll be difficult to accurately represent them in a non-biased and uniform way. For example, although many players say that vision is a high contributing factor in winning the game, we would not say that ward placement is a strong performance indicator for the AD Carry role. There are new players from the NA CS, EU LCS, and LCK, along with veteran players who have not participated in competitive play for at least a split. Since there is no easy, unbiased way to adjust for regional strength, we will have to assume that how they play in one region will transfer 1:1 in North America. However, a performance score will be negatively adjusted in order to account for the discrepancy of strength between LCS and CS caliber players. A similar negative adjuster will be applied to veterans who have not been competitively competing to account for a possible degradation of skill. Due to the complexity of League of Legends, there are a lot of explanatory variables that go into how well a player performs — and there are even more that contribute to the match result. With more variables, we increase the likelihood that we introduce collinearity, which would cause unwanted over-adjustment. We attempted to limit the amount of variables used by creating a single index score for each player. Thorough checking would have to have been done before adding in specific variables.

5.1 - Results: Power Ranking

It’s interesting to note that there seems to be strong variability between seeds 1&2, 3&4, 5&6, and the bottom four teams.

5.2 - Review: Teams and Players

Summary: Taking the first seed, we have TSM. Coming off a hot 2017 year and a mediocre worlds (again), TSM replaced three of their players with proven bot lane — Zven and Mithy, and rookie of the split — MikeYeung. Arguably, the new bot lane may not be a significant upgrade, therefore all eyes will be on rookie jungler, MikeYeung. There have been arguments as to whether or not MikeYeung was over-hyped or if he’ll continue with the fantastic momentum he picked up when he was on Phoenix1. However, with four world-class veterans and the newly acquired Coach Ssong — who brought a bottom tier team to worlds — Mike will have quite the support system to make sure he performs to the TSM standard. With this five-man roster, we expect TSM to be able to take first place.

Player of Interest: MikeYeung

With just as many critics as fans, MikeYeung has a lot to prove as the rookie jungler of TSM. Having possibly picked MikeYeung over Contractz, TSM has made a bold statement in the potential they see that MikeYeung has in being both a mechanically gifted player and possible shot-caller for the team. Whether or not TSM dominates or struggles (especially against the 2nd seed), will be dependent on MikeYeung since he is the most “unproven” of the squad. All eyes on MikeYeung.