2022 Spring champions are looking to bounce back from a rough regular season.
CLG vs Evil Geniuses is a very unexpected Lower Bracket elimination game if we look through the preseason expectations as coming into the season many power rankings had Evil Geniuses as a top-two team. But they haven’t had the best season so far, nor the luckiest one. Last two weeks of the Spring Split they struggled with a lot of health issues and had to play remotely, even subbing in Ryoma for one game.
CLG on the other side performed a lot better than expected during the regular season, climbing to a top-four finish with a 3-0 superweek. Unfortunately, they had to play Cloud9 in their first playoff series and fell down to the Lower Bracket, even though they put up a good fight against the reigning champions.
Winner of CLG vs Evil Geniuses will face the winner of 100T vs GG and the defeated team will see their season end. So the stakes are as high as it gets for the Spring Split.
CLG vs Evil Geniuses Preview
CLG
CLG is an interesting team. At their best, they can contest any top team in the LCS as we saw against Cloud9. When they draft around giving Contractz resources early, he knows how to navigate the game. He is good at creating early dives and finding good ganks. They can also always fall back to more scaling comps with traditional AD carries and play around Luger. Utilizing flex picks like Jayce, Akali and Yone always made CLG a hard team to prepare for.
But things aren’t always positive. Almost all of the CLG players are very prone to making unforced errors. Maybe it stems from the fact that they are all playmakers and always looking for the next move, but that doesn’t change the fact they can sometimes put a winning game in danger. Stability will be especially important for them against EG in the bot lane. FBI and Vulcan have been solid laners all split with EG playing around them well, and with Poome having a rough series against Cloud9 the CLG bot lane will need to bounce back.
Evil Geniuses
We said FBI and Vulcan are playing rather well in this Split, with the latter even finding himself in the 1st All-Pro team. EG bot lane is probably the only consistent factor this roster had all Spring long with the top side having their ups and downs. They prefer to play more lane-dominant picks like Lucian/Nami or Caitlyn/Lux, and while these picks can be good against the CLG bot lane they will need a lot of assistance from Inspired as Contractz loves to gank bot lane. To be fair Inspired will need to cover more than bot side. While Dhokla played three Sion games against Cloud9, he can always pull out his carry champions and Ssumday generally is fine to play these volatile lanes.
But even with all this talk about the rest of the map, Evil Geniuses fans have one question in their minds coming into the series. Is Jojopyun back in form? 2023 has been rough for the young player, even before he got sick. His unnecessary deaths skyrocketed this split and these deaths actually started to contribute to his team losing more and more. CLG is a scrappy team that knows how to take advantage when a team has a big weakness, so if Jojo continues to play as sloppy as he has been so far, Evil Geniuses can find themselves in trouble.
CLG vs Evil Geniuses Predictions
Credit where credit is due, CLG is a good team. Still, it feels weird to think Evil Geniuses aren’t favorites coming into a series against them. But there comes a point it’s hard to give any team, or player, the benefit of the doubt before they have to prove themselves once again. EG had a full regular season to fix their issues and we didn’t see too much improvement. One week isn’t that much time to magically do that now, so I’m expecting CLG to take this Bo5 3-2.
How to watch CLG vs Evil Geniuses
CLG vs Evil Geniuses will be played tomorrow, March 26, for a chance to qualify for the Finals Weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. You can watch the games on lolesports.com, or the official LCS Youtube and Twitch channels. For Spanish-speaking fans, LCS also started their Spanish broadcast in partnership with LLA, you can find the stream on the LLA Twitch channel.
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