Everything you missed from Week 8 of the NA LCS

In the second to last week of the NA LCS Spring Split, the league got a whole lot more complicated.

Heading into the week, everything was supposed to be simple. The league leaders all looked to have fairly standard match ups with predictable outcomes. Then Clutch Gaming beat Echo Fox in the first match and things got a little out of control. Top teams started falling, and we got a whole new look at which teams in the NA LCS are the best.

Let’s start with Echo Fox. Once the indisputable favorites in the league, now Echo Fox is in a bit of a spiral. Over the last three weeks, they’ve only managed to win two of their six games, and those were against Team Liquid — more on them later — and OpTic Gaming — who are currently tied for last place in the league. In other words, they weren’t wins that inspire a lot of confidence.

As for some of the other teams that spent the first half of the split at the top, the week didn’t look much better. Cloud9, the current top team, has always been a little inconsistent, so their loss to TSM wasn’t shocking. Team Liquid is nearing the end of a free fall that’s lasted almost five weeks now and has left them at 9-7, in a must win position if they want to make playoffs.

So if these three teams have fallen off of their dominant early split form, who has taken their place? Most recently, the answer to that question is TSM. Over the last few weeks, TSM have looked as good as any team in the league and have won five of their last six games. But that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has watched the NA LCS over the last five years. What might be surprising are the other two teams that are currently looking strong.

100 Thieves, who have one of the most experienced rosters in the NA LCS have looked good on and off so far this spring. They are a team that can be counted on to beat the league’s bottom teams, but rarely compete with the top with almost perfect consistency. Clutch Gaming on the other hand are all over the place. Just this week, they took down Echo Fox and lost to Team Liquid in the same week.

With top teams taking a tumble and a whole new crop of best teams rising up, the NA LCS has gotten a whole lot more interesting, just in time for playoffs.