One of the most exciting rosters heading into the 2019 LCS season was undoubtedly the Golden Guardians. The team had just finished a very lackluster 2018 season, but after picking up some of the hottest names in Western League of Legends, including Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell, Kim “Olleh” Joo-sung, Henrik “Froggen” Hansen, hopes were high.
Unfortunately, the first week of competitive play in the LCS wrapped up today, and the new GGS roster failed to live up to the hype. They dropped both games of the week, one to FlyQuest and another to Echo Fox, meaning they’ll have a lot of ground to make up when the second week rolls around.
There were a lot of issues, unfortunately, and about half of them revolved around the new players. Froggen, in particular, seemed to struggle to communicate with jungler Juan “Contractz” Garcia, as many of the team’s errors this weekend happened when the pair weren’t on the same page. In the match against FlyQuest, for example, they both dropped deaths very early after failing to work together around the river. They ended that game a collective 0-6.
Olleh had a rough week, too, as both games ended with a high death count and low assist total for him. Fortunately, the issues for both Olleh and Froggen seem to boil down to synergy with their duos, being Contractz and Matthew “Deftly” Chen respectively. Communication errors can be solved through repetition, though, so hopefully, for GGS’ sake, they won’t be long-lived.
Hauntzer, on the other hand, played fine this week. His first game, in particular, was an impressive Vladimir performance, although he wasn’t able to turn that into a win for the team. His second game against Echo Fox was slightly worse, but he wasn’t plagued by some of the same fundamental issues as the rest of his team at least.
Still, League is an extremely cooperative game on the big stage, so they’ll need to collectively improve if they want to bounce back during week two.
