Cloud9’s LoL Team Looking to Reclaim the Top

Going by the results from 2016 and the latest announcements from the team, 2017 should have been the year when Cloud9’s League of Legends team would be returning to its former glory. After being the only team from North America that participated in the World Championship, Cloud9 announced they’d be aiming for the top in 2017.

In order to achieve these goals, Cloud9 has brought back some of the players who have already played at the Worlds Championship. With the addition of Jung ‘Impact’ Eon and the rookie player Andy ‘Smoothie’ Ta, Cloud9 clearly had its eyes set on the top spot.

So far, they’ve been performing well and staying near the top on the leaderboard. Currently, Cloud9 is in the second place with TSM being the only team with better results. However, it needs to be said that TSM lost three games more than Cloud9 so far. TSM also went through the roster change by bringing in Jason ‘WildTurtle’ Tran instead of Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng which didn’t quite produce the desired effect.

However, even though Cloud9 is currently in the second place, the players and others involved are a bit restless because the team has been displaying several issues that need to be fixed as soon as possible. If this doesn’t happen, they are likely to find themselves in a tight spot. So far, they have struggled with clean victories and several other issues in their play, and the question is what exactly does Cloud9 need to fix.

Problems in the Early Game

One of the issues that needs fixing is their early game performance. Looking only at the numbers from the early game, we come to the conclusion that Cloud9 is all the way in the bottom half of the standings and because of that many fans and experts have criticized Cloud9 for bad early game performance.

Perhaps the biggest blame has been put on Juan ‘Contractz’ Garcia, a 17-year-old player who is the only new member of the team. ‘Contractz’ has shown some exceptional abilities, and many of his games were amazing, but the fact is that he is struggling a lot in the early game and he will have to improve just like every other player on the team.

Team’s General Shortcomings

Juan ‘Contractz’ Garcia is not the only one player from Cloud9 team who needs to take the blame, especially given the fact his performances are starting to show the signs of improvement. However, the biggest problem seems to be the inability of the entire team to follow through with their plans and support each other as the match moves on. That became evident the most when they played against Team Dignitas and when they struggled more than they should’ve had because Dignitas is far below Cloud9’s level.

Final Thoughts

Moving forward, Cloud9 needs to have a clear plan for Juan ‘Contractz’ Garcia because the young jungler knows the business and he is extremely talented. What he needs are clear instructions and task assignment. Besides that, they also need to work as a team much more than they have done so far. Preparation is perhaps crucial to success, and if Cloud9 fails to prepare, they will have very hard time achieving their goal of returning to the top.