Just ahead of LCS Week 1, let’s take a look at our expectations in our Golden Guardians LCS Preview.
Golden Guardians finished the Spring split with a 9-9 record and in the fifth place. When you see a record like this, you expect a team that is better than average and a team that gives you some level of confidence when you watch them. For some reason, GG never gives me any confidence in their abilities when I watch them play.
Golden Guardians LCS Preview Summer 2022 Roster
- Eric ‘Licorice’ Ritchie
- Milo ‘Pridestalkr’ Wehnes
- Nicholas ‘Ablazeolive’ Antonio Abbott
- Trevor ‘Stixxay’ Hayes
- Kim ‘Olleh’ Joo-sung
When looking at the nameplates this team has some pretty good players. Both Milo ‘Pridestalkr’ Wehnes and Kim ‘Olleh’ Joo-sung had a good Spring. And I expect them to keep it up, especially Pridestalkr. Even with the changes of the durability update seems more like a nerf for the dubbed ‘assassin jungler’, he actually had a deep champion pool and performed well on meta picks like Hecarim and Xin Zhao.
The solo lanes, on the other hand, were more coin flippy than they should’ve been. Both Eric ‘Licorice’ Ritchie and Nicholas ‘Ablazeolive’ Antonio Abbott are good players in my opinion, and both should be more consistent in an ideal world. With Licorice, there were games he just solos won or lost depending on how his 1v1 went in the top lane. And Ablazeolive is famous for getting caught in weird places and dying this early in his career.
This bad habit of feeding the enemy much-needed kills just because of lack of attention or just plain mispositioning on Ablazeolive’s part is a big hindrance to his potential. He otherwise had a pretty good split with good laning stats and he dealt nearly a third of his team’s total damage during any game. But he has been long thought of as the next generation of native mids. Unless he makes necessary changes in his game. Like cutting back the aggressiveness and paying more attention to where the enemy is, he will have a hard time rising above the average level of the league and carrying his team to the top of the standings.
Even with all these, I am still hopeful for GG. I believe in Ablaze and Licorice to get consistent. I enjoy watching Olleh and Pride. Most importantly, I trust that the coach of GG Nick ‘Inero’ Smith is usually very good at getting the most out of his players. Plus, they made an improvement in the ADC role. They replaced Lawrence ‘Lost’ Hui with the veteran Trevor ‘Stixxay’ Hayes. Stixxay played in Academy the last split, even though he was just supposed to be coaching, and dominated the league. This is a good sign as Stixxay once showed a great potential to carry games and GG can use that right now.
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