I’d like to issue a public apology to the Paris Eternal. I doubted you and I was wrong. I placed you second to last in my 2020 Power Rankings and now you sit within my top five teams in the league at the moment. Among names like the Philadelphia Fusion and the New York Excelsior, Paris sits as an inarguable top team at the moment. People fixate on their slow start and their most recent loss to Houston, but those are all excusable or, at the very least, understandable. Yes, they started slow but that can be explained with the absence of Eoghan "Smex" O'Neill and their starter at flex tank, Choi "Hanbin" Han-been, only turning 18 a short time after the league was set to begin. And with Hero Pools, is it so far fetched to assume that maybe we had a bad read on the Outlaws? This was a team that was admittedly very ill, so much so, that players were not traveling with the team to events. Now, they are healthy and have a new lease on life with the Dive style being one of the two leading compositions in Hero Pools at the moment. Could you claim that Paris had a bad read coming into Week 5? 100%, but that’s the gamble of Hero Pools, sometimes you just miss the mark. Take the Eternal team and how they looked on Sunday and compare them to Saturday. The difference is night and day.

Paris Eternal @ ParisEternal

🇺🇸 After a wild 5 map series, we take the win! Sorry about those preds 😉 GG's 🇫🇷 Quel match... pour la meilleure des victoires ! 😍 GG's @Fusion 🇺🇸 After a wild 5 map series, we take the win! Sorry about those preds 😉 GG's @Fusion

I was skeptical if the team’s fully South Korean coaching staff would be to both effectively communicate with a mixed roster and have their Western players buy into their style of coaching. I said this was something that would benefit Paris in the long run, and I still believe that, but since their debut, the Eternal look well prepared and on top of things. Yes, I think that there are still improvements to be made, but this was a team that previously finished the 2019 season, admittedly with a completely different roster, 14th with an 11-17 record. I criticized a lot of the stock people put on you and dismissed it as “Spr9k1e fever.” Instead of looking at the players who made up the Element Mystic core and rookie all-stars like Brice "FDGod" Monsçavoir. And I drew a skeptical eye to their coaching staff who, by in large, are my vote for the biggest change in this team. Read more: Should San Francisco Be Worried About Defending Their Title? General manager Kim "NineK" Bumhoon and head coach Yun "RUSH" Hee-won must dabble in some alchemical texts in their free time because they’ve taken this hodgepodge roster and turn it into gold. As of March 14th, the Paris Eternal are the 3rd best team at converting first kills into team fight wins. They also boast an average to below-average first death rate at 47.5% while also being the 6th best team at being able to turn the fight in their favor after suffering the first death. And on average they sit among the top of the pack as the 6th highest team fight win rate at 53.1%. This also does not account for the coaching staff’s more bread and butter approach to managing the team.