NA Teams at IEM San Jose

          NA Teams in IEM San Jose showed a lot of promise and has gotten me very hype for the upcoming season  TSM’s new super team showed that they can become a good team if they had a shot caller while CLG looks as strong as they did in the past but still need some time fixing a few problems here and ther

       First of all we shall start with TSM, so let me start by saying that seeing Doublelift in a TSM shirt is still kinda weird and I find myself slapping myself a couple of times to check if i was dreaming. Ok besides that this TSM squad is what you would call a super team, every role of this team was an integral part of their previous teams. These players are very vocal and could be a big problem in the future but so far they did pretty well in the tournament by beating LGD in the quarterfinals even though they lost to Origen. The main thing that I really saw in the TSM squad was that it felt like Kasing and Doublelift still need sometime to get used to each other. Hauntzer on the other hand looks pretty solid and is a definite upgrade from dyrus. The big problem right now is that they looked very shaky when it comes to coordinating big team plays and is mostly likely cause by their poor shotcalling. This TSM squad is very skilled in lane and mechanically but someone needs to step up to become the shot caller for the team.

             CLG on other hand had a better showing in this tourney by taking second. CLG’s new players were kinda iffy on this tourney. The veterans on this team seemed like they improved a lot since worlds especially xmithie with his gragas play and Darshan did not give easy kills in the laning phase and carried the team in most of the games. On to the midlaner Huhi who had a very shacky start to his CLG career. Huhi had a very interesting champion pool and was just doing decent on most of them, he would often mess up ults or try to go for very ballsy plays. It felt like in this tourney he was trying to prove that he was a good midlaner but actually this mentality was detrimental to the team because it led him to force plays out of nowhere.

            Stixxay on the other hand felt like a dollar store version of Doublelift, he has a very similar playstyle to doublelift and played the same role as Doublelift in that he was mainly used to push down turrets. Stixxay has some more room to grow into a spectacular player and he did have some good plays but it is very telling that this was his first games as a pro.