With a win over Evil Geniuses in today’s second-round LCS Spring Playoff match, Golden Guardians have clinched their best LCS split in franchise history, as they’ve secured a third-place finish at the very least.
Prior to today, Golden Guardians’ best single-split performance came in the Summer of 2020 when they finished fifth—just two series away from a World Championship appearance. With today’s win, the franchise finally has a top-three finish to its name, and now sits just one more best-of-five away from participating in its first-ever LCS finals.
Today’s series against EG wasn’t particularly close, either. Any late-split worries that Golden Guardians might have had were firmly thrown out the window, as they dispatched EG by way of a clean 3-0 sweep with an average game time just over 30 minutes. This victory comes in stark contrast to last week’s 3-2 nailbiter over 100 Thieves, in which Golden Guardians faced potential elimination twice in the same series.
As has been the case throughout a strong majority of Golden Guardians’ victories this season, veteran AD carry Stixxay put the team on his back throughout the entirety of the series, posting a combined scoreline of 16/1/13 across the three games, while serving up a DPM of 618 to boot.
“Even I’m really surprised about how the games went,” Stixxay said in a post-game interview on the LCS broadcast. “I think today, for whatever reason, we clicked really well. We were looking out for each other in the games, we were playing very disciplined, and we pretty much just played around wherever [GG jungler] River was pathing, and I think we did a pretty good job of it.”
In games two and three, Stixxay picked Tristana, marking the first time that the champion had been picked as an ADC in the LCS this season. He is only the fourth major region AD carry to pick the champion this season, as Tristana has primarily served as a mid laner in 2023 with 42 picks at that position, according to League stats site Games of Legends.
The three clean victories for Golden Guardians puts them on a five-game winning streak, just three short of the eight-game streak they went on earlier this split. Next weekend, they’ll head to Raleigh, North Carolina for the LCS Spring Finals, where their lower bracket finals counterparts FlyQuest await them. FlyQuest lead the season series against Golden Guardians by a score of two games to zero so far.
