Après la défaite de son équipe lors du 3e tour des playoffs du LEC Summer Split 2022 face à Fnatic, James "Mac" MacCormack, l'entraineur en chef de l’équipe MAD Lions, a répondu à nos questions, l'occasion de revenir rapidement sur la rencontre, de parler des Worlds 2022 de League of Legends.
After their loss against Fnatic and their elimination from playoffs, MAD Lions’ coach James "Mac" MacCormack answered our questions.
So you just last again, Fnatic today, according to you, what is missing for you to take the win and go to Malmo?
I think there are a lot of things. I think game one, the draft was a bit hard in terms of early, but like it was it was workable. But I think we misexecuted a lot. And we didn't have a particularly good game one. So I think we could have had a better draft in Game one. Game two was pretty good from us. Game three, I think game three, we definitely had If not a winning position. Definitely like a. At least a 50/50 position, but in the game at least we felt like we were in a winning position. I'd have to watch it again to know, but we didn't cover our flanks well enough in that game. We didn't teamfight correctly around our Cassiopeia. So we had two teamfights where Cassiopeia wasn't able to deal damage, and she was the main carrier in the comp, right. We also had some early deaths on botlane and then Game four was just a really hard early snowball. Honestly, we could have come back in that game. But the final fight on the on the Third Dragon, we could have given that third dragon and played for gold on Sivir because severe would have gone infinity edge we were fighting against 3.5 item Lucian I think with severe without infinity. Then again, Victor was kind of upscaling us, so it's tough. I think Fnatic had some really good answers. I think the victor answer was really problematic for us into our champion pool this series. So credit to them for that. I think they had some really solid ideas about how to draft against us. I think their blue side draft, where they pitched us on botlane was really smart.With this result, you're still going to worlds in a month. What are the points you want to improve before going into the play-in stage?
I mean, the biggest thing that when it comes to play-in will literally just be learning the patch because we will have very, very little time. I think we will be flying to Mexico on the 24th, probably playing on the 29th. The patch only comes out on the 21st. So you actually have a really, really short amount of time. As far as I'm aware, the patch, it should be the 12.18 comes out on the 21st. So the main thing before well will actually just be working on actually understanding the patch and making sure we get the matchups that we're that we're comfortable with and we have a good read on the meta. I think that will be the most important thing by far. Obviously, there are always things that we can work on as a team, right? One of them I think was better team fight approach around dragons. We can improve our mid-to-late game rotations. We can be much more efficient with kind of gold generation. I think Fnatic was out farming us in some games that they perhaps shouldn't have been today. So yeah, there's a lot for us to work on.
So to keep talking a bit about words, we have now a pretty clear idea of which team will go to worlds. Which region do you think is the most threatening right now?
LPL by far, in my opinion.
Can I ask you why?
Well, I think they're just better like that. Just better. Okay. Is that, like, the best League of Legends in the world is currently played in China, and I don't think there are many teams in the world that will be able to stand up to LPL teams. I think there are currently six LPL teams that would have a very good chance of winning the LEC. I think that a lot of the teams that will be attending worlds will be weaker than the LPL teams that didn't make it, the fifth and sixth place seeds. But that's my personal opinion on China. That's also perhaps biased by my own personal taste in the way League of Legends is played. But I think that the Chinese teams are just complete in the sense that they have fantastic early games. They specialize really, really aggressively. They play really well to their players strengths. They are super aggressive. Their team fighting is fantastic. I don't think they don't tend to let you breathe, obviously. I think Gen.G is fantastic. But I think they haven't been challenged in Korea yet. So you can't really tell how good they're going to be. Are they as good as Damwon was last year? Maybe, but maybe not. So really hard to say. But yeah, outside of Gen.G, I think that there are not that many teams that are as good as the LPL teams.A lot of people are, criticizing, the way the LEC works, with the best of ones. Do you think the best of three for Asian regions helps them to be more competitive? Or this is another way to work that helps them to be more competitive?
I think doing BO3 raises an advantage, like just playing more stage games is an advantage competitively for sure. There's a drawback, which is that their schedule is horrible, like playing in the LPL. You have to just be able to grind nonstop, like the practice schedule of LPL teams is, Absolutely insane, and I don't think there are many European teams that would be able to keep up with that level of practice, frankly. Like the format there basically selects for players who are able to keep up with that level of grind. Right. And that can in and of itself be an advantage because being able to, Kind of finish strong and being able to have this insane work ethic allows you to adapt faster.
It allows you to still strong performances towards the end of the year when everyone is burnt out. Right. And I think that's generally speaking an advantage. So overall, I think that BO3 is an advantage. Obviously, that doesn't mean that it's actually pleasurable to do as a competitor. Right. Like I've spoken to Shad0w, for example, since he went over to China and the schedule that they have is really, really punishing. It's very, very hard to maintain for a long time. I don't know if I would be able to do it, frankly. So that's my own personal. Yes. But overall, yeah. Does it produce Better League of Legends? Yeah, absolutely. Sure.
Now to come back to Europe. So now that we have the free final teams, as a prediction, who do you think will win LEC?
I don't think it would be rogue. I think it would be between Fnatic and G2. My guess in this matter would be Fnatic. I think Fnatic Botlane is incredibly, incredibly good and I think it's pretty hard to ban them out in this meta. I don't think that you can realistically make the game not about botlane in the current matter, and I think that will favour them.
Okay, well, this interview is coming to an end and the last word is yours if you have anything to say.
Mostly I would just like to kind of apologize to our fans for having such a weak showing in playoffs. Obviously, everyone was very excited about Mad Lions after we got the MVP, the All-Pro team, the coach of the split, after we went from not making it in spring to being top four /second place regular in summer. Right. We showed a lot of promise. I was going to say, unfortunately, but I suppose it's not really unfortunate. It's just on us that we weren't able to adapt quickly enough throughout the playoffs and we simply just didn't show. I think the level of performances that were necessary in kind of the clutch moments. We had too many games that we lost with a lead. We had too many games that were like snowballed really, really aggressively against us from the other game. And when that happened, we kind of fell apart. So that's ultimately that's on me, I think especially we also had some, some rough drafts which are very much on me.
All I can say is thank you for the people that support us and that we will do our best to be back on top at Worlds. You know. Certainly disappointed in our performance. I'm happy and proud that we managed to turn it around from spring. I think making worlds after losing playoffs is something that not many teams managed to do, even if we did it without winning a BO5, which I mean, it's , It's not ideal. And, you know, outside of the fact that it helped us this split, I think it's personally I personally think it's not optimal, you know, to be able to qualify for worlds without winning a BO5. But at least for the split, that's the way it is. Right. But at the very least, I think we had a good turnaround for that, I'm happy and I hope our fans are happy, but obviously we can do much more. We will do much more. Thank you for supporting us and thank you for your patience with us.
