Everyone agrees: either Cloud9 or Team Liquid should be the best team in the LCS in 2021. (If you can find someone who ranks another team ahead of those two, you should ping me on Twitter or the Oracle’s Elixir Discord, because I’d be fascinated to hear a cogent set of arguments to back up that opinion!)

I officially power ranked Cloud9 number 1 in December, but Team Liquid is a very worthy selection for that honour, and it didn’t take me much effort to come up with this list of arguments for why I could, or maybe even should, have put them in the top spot, instead.

Time to see whether I can convince any of you, and maybe even myself, to move Team Liquid up a spot in 2021 expectations.

1. CoreJJ

Reason number 1 is pretty easy… Team Liquid has CoreJJ.

I’m on the record as believing Perkz will be the best player in the LCS from the moment of his arrival, but it’s really a 1A / 1B situation with CoreJJ. I have no issue with anyone saying CoreJJ is 1 and Perkz is 2. Both players are really incredible, and serve as multipliers for their teams, not only delivering the highest quality of individual play, but finding ways to unlock stronger performances from their teammates both with their in-game actions and with out-of-game leadership, teaching skills, and work ethic.

CoreJJ is a world champion, he’s the reigning LCS MVP, and he’s been very publicly spearheading the “in-house” movement this offseason that saw so many pro and aspiring-pro NA players come together for regular organized matches to provide a more valuable practice environment than grinding solo queue. That’s a great sign of CoreJJ’s dedication to improving the NA LoLscene, but it’s also evidence of how hard he works to level up his teammates, since he has spent many of that games playing alongside other members of the TL organization, including Tactical as well as TL Academy’s new Bot laner, Yeon.

2. Nurturing Nicolaj

CoreJJ may be Team Liquid’s best player, but Jensen is arguably their most important, partly because he occupies the crucial Mid lane spot that has been the figurative and literal centre of League of Legends for so much of the game’s history, and partly because he’s the style of Mid who functions best when his team plays around and through him. Team Liquid’s ownership clearly feels the same way since they made him the highest-paid player on the team when they re-signed him this offseason.

With the acquisitions of Santorin and Alphari in free agency, Jensen has been set up for an MVP season. Santorin is fresh off a season where his work as an enabler and stabilizer for PowerOfEvil earned him second-team All Pro in summer (for transparency: I voted him third-team and I stand by it!). I’m oversimplifying, but there are definitely similarities between the ways Jensen and PowerOfEvil contribute to their teams, and there was plenty of opportunity for improvement in the dynamic between Jensen and his Jungler in 2020. If Santorin can fill the same role in 2021 on TL that he did on FLY in 2020, it should help Jensen improve on his own performances. And Alphari’s ability to apply pressure in the lane phase—something Impact reliably could not do, partly due to usage—should also benefit Jensen by drawing more draft resources and jungle pressure away from him and allowing him to more comfortably play the highly lane-dominant, low map influence style that has usually been his hallmark.

The new Team Liquid roster dynamic puts Jensen in the best possible position to succeed in highly visible ways.

3. Infrastructure Overhaul

There were far bigger changes to Team Liquid’s coaching staff than there were to the team’s starting roster, and if you give Jatt a reasonable amount of credit for rescuing Team Liquid from their 9thplace Spring finish, then it’s entirely fair to have faith in his newly rebuilt coaching staff and use that to bolster your optimism for 2021.

Team Liquid’s mid-2020 reset will always be remembered primarily for Doublelift being dropped and Tactical promoted in his place, which looked like a fantastic move all the way up until Doublelift and TSM won the summer split. (In fairness, it was a fantastic move, despite the team results, because Tactical played better than Doublelift all split long, including the playoffs, and continues to be a player of the future for the org.) But the mid-year changes also saw TL hire Jatt away from the LCS broadcast team to become their new Head Coach, dropping Cain into a strategic coaching role.

Given the opportunity to make further changes, Jatt chose to release Cain, Croissant, and Tyler, replacing them by signing former LEC and LCS Jungler Kold, promoting Yaltz from Academy to the LCS, and hiring a new face, H4xDefender, to operate as a two-way coach to facilitate between the LCS and Academy squads and keep the entire org on the same page. TL also brought in Oceanic caster-turned-coach Spawn as the new Academy head coach, which shouldn’t affect the LCS group at all but might have some influence by osmosis. (For what it’s worth, if any of the players Spawn coaches end up having meaningful influence on TL’s LCS results in 2021, then something will have gone catastrophically wrong…)

It’s incredibly difficult to evaluate coaching staffs as a whole, or coaches individually, from outside of the organization. I’m not going to pretend to have real insight into how these individual coaches might come together, or whether their coaching styles fit the roster’s learning styles or preferred ways of playing. I can only speak in abstract generalities. But like I said above, if you give Jatt a share of the credit for Team Liquid’s summer turnaround, and extrapolate that into a positive sense of his judgment and ability, then you can be safe in your optimism around his new staff and their potential to lead TL to victory.

Will They Do It?

After presenting all of these arguments, the question is: have I convinced myself that I should rank Team Liquid number 1 in my 2021 expectations?

It’s tempting.

Team Liquid are a very safe bet. They have so much raw player ability that even if Cloud9 outpace them in sophistication—perhaps with stronger drafting, greater meta flexibility, or more creative coordinated playmaking, much of which could stem simply from having Perkz around—Team Liquid should still more reliably beat the “bad teams” they come up against. Over a long season, having such a high “skill floor” will surely help them be in the best possible position for playoff seedings. It’s almost unthinkable that Team Liquid won’t finish the regular season in a top-2 position, while I wouldn’t be quite as surprised if Cloud9 found themselves in 3rd or 4thby the time the Summer playoffs roll around. A higher seed might be all Team Liquid needs to edge ahead of the competition in the best-of-five portion of the year.

In the end, though, these are all of the reasons I ranked Team Liquid second. I still believe Cloud9 have a higher ceiling, though a full elucidation of why I feel that way would require an article at least this long. I suppose you could refer back to the Cloud9 segment of my power rankings to get most of that reasoning.

I suspect I’ll have a lot more to say about Cloud9—and Team Liquid!—over the coming months.