Spoilers for Friday’s games at Worlds!
CLG has taken their second game in group stages today, betting the wildcard team Pain Gaming, and in convincing fashion too. While it is no surprise for them to do well over the Brazilian team, what is surprising has been the play since playoffs. They haven’t lost a game since! Something must of happened, and over on goldper10.com, Foxmylife has gathered up some raw statistics that show just how much better CLG is playing:
I realized I had to dig deeper so I looked at the gold difference at 10 and 20 minutes into every single regular split game, with the tiebreakers being exempted. I also took notes of their total numbers of dragons, towers and kills taken at 20 minutes as well as how many of these objectives they had relative to their opponents, and how many first bloods they got and which of the players were involved into them. These numbers painted a very different picture of how CLG played the game.
In general there were three big changes, the most noticeable one being all their on-average statistics, the second one being the first blood statistics, and the third one are the carries’ damage per minute (dpm). Those changes tells us that CLG improved their team fighting, had more defined roles in terms of who the carries actually are, and improved their shotcalling.
To understand these three conclusions we will have to revisit the old CLG of spring 2015. During the entire split CLG were known for having a stellar early game, but as several analysts was continuously pointing out: CLG were not good at team fighting, and thus relied on their early game advantages to act as a bandage for their glaring mid game weaknesses. Hai even said that it felt like CLG had map hacks when playing against them. However they only managed to close out two games with a gold deficit at 20 minutes. That was against Coast, which were by far the worst team in the league, and Team 8.
Over in the full article you can see all the work put into graphing these changes, it is a huge difference from split to split, and you can only see their play getting better. Check out this great article highlighting the growth of NA’s number 1 seed over here.
