Academy Standouts highlights the players who performed best in the most recent week of NA Academy play. I’ll discuss a few of the most noteworthy standouts, then list some other players whose performances caught my eye below.
Watch Tim’s pick for Game of the Week
Busio, Support, 100 Thieves Academy
If you talk to people inside the 100 Thieves org, they’ll proclaim Busio as the saviour of the NA Support talent pool. In his first week in Academy, he looked like it, especially in the series against CLG Academy where he absolutely popped off on Thresh and followed it up with a Tahm Kench game where he seemed to connect his knockup on every W he used. If Busio can play this well for even 50% of his games this year, he’s going to become everything 100 Thieves say he is.
First up, the spotlight shines on EG Academy’s new bot laner, Kaori. EGA went 1 and 3 this week, splitting their series with Team Liquid Academy and dropping both games of their second series to Immortals Academy, but Kaori played well in the losses and played INCREDIBLY well in the wins. His Jhin against TL Academy was an explosive arrival to North America, with great ult snipes and snare setups throughout. His Jinx team fighting was nearly as good.
You might expect, upon seeing Niles’ name at the top of this list, that he got to spam a bunch of aggressive carries plus Gangplank and run over games with resources and confidence plays. But if you take a look, you’ll see three games each of Ornn and Gnar (along with, yes, three Gangplanks, two Camilles, and a Pantheon!?).