While Weibo Gaming top laner TheShy had a solid run through the 2023 edition of League of Legends Worlds, his performance in the finals against T1 left a lot to be desired.
TheShy only notched one kill and five assists during the three-game series despite snagging Aatrox, one of his signature champions, twice. During the third and final game of the match, TheShy struggled on Kennen. It was the first time he posted back-to-back games with below a 1.0 KDA since the LPL Summer regular season. Coming into the grand finals, TheShy led the Worlds field in solo kills, but he was outclassed by T1’s Choi “Zeus” Woo-je, who won MVP for the grand finals. Zeus only died a total of four times and was stellar on Gwen and Aatrox in a pair of routs in games two and three.
While it’s certainly possible to be a huge contributor to a win in a game of League and not go positive, three negative performances in a row are certainly not helping in any way. The rest of Weibo Gaming was dispatched almost as easily, though; the team only notched one total kill during the second game. Light, Weibo’s ADC, didn’t notch a single kill until the third match, and by then, T1 were on an unstoppable wave of momentum.
While Weibo Gaming certainly will look back on making the grand finals as moral victory, it can’t feel good to be on the losing end of one of the most one-sided Worlds grand finals ever. The best-of-five was finished in a little under 90 minutes of in-game time, and outside of some early game pressure, it didn’t look like Weibo Gaming came to play at all.
