The offseason was supposed to fix everything. 100 Thieves ended 2018 on a sour note, crashing out of Worlds with a makeshift roster that felt incomplete. But then, on Thanksgiving Day of all days, reports spread that they had found the magic bullet. Bae “Bang” Jun-sik—yes, that Bang, the two-time world champion bot laner, the marksman who racked up 1,000 kills in Korea—was coming to North America.
Bang was supposed to fix all of 100 Thieves’ issues and make them championship material. But just two months into the 2019 campaign, 100 Thieves are no closer to figuring things out than they were last year. They are 4-7 and can still make playoffs, but the hope of Thanksgiving has given way to the dreadful reality of the cold North American winter.
On Saturday, 100 Thieves snapped a four-game losing streak with a win over Clutch Gaming. But it was an ugly, messy win—one that required an incredibly improbable comeback. And throughout the game, 100 Thieves showed that they haven’t actually fixed many of their issues at all.
Over five weeks of play, 100 Thieves have failed to turn their collection of stars into a team that’s more than the sum of its parts. This is why they’ve failed—and also how they can turn it all around and recapture the hope of Thanksgiving.
The superstar
The one player acquisition that has defined 100 Thieves the most didn’t come from the rebuild last offseason. It was completed in 2017 when the team had just been accepted as a new franchised partner in the LCS. Getting Zaqueri “Aphromoo” Black from CLG was a big sign that the new team was ready to make a splash. But the real shocker came when 100 Thieves picked up top laner Kim “Ssumday” Chan-ho from Dignitas.
Ssumday has become one of the most recognizable Korean stars in North America. The affable, soft-spoken Ssumday has the most Twitter followers of any Korean transplant—even the wildly popular Lee “Rush” Yoon-jae, who’s been in the region for much longer, can’t compete. 100 Thieves signed him to become a superstar, and he didn’t disappoint. He was a rock for the team, coming through even as they struggled with a lack of priority in both mid and bot lane, and as they worked in rookie jungler Andy “AnDa” Hoang.
The glue
The part of the map that needs AnDa the most is the mid lane, manned by Choi “Huhi” Jae-hyun. Huhi was signed to replace veteran mid Yoo “Ryu” Sang-wook, who has moved to the coaching staff.
Before this year, we had Huhi on a list of five players to watch in the LCS because of how important he was to holding this team together. He was supposed to be their glue guy—a player fluent in both Korean and English who played at the Nexus of the map.
The carry
Bang was one of the few players on the team who did have a good game against Clutch. His lane was the only one that didn’t outright lose and his late-game damage was immense.
But Bang has spent most of the year stuck in losing lanes where he doesn’t get influence from either mid lane or jungle. In a way, he’s used to that—Bang’s bot lane was never really a pressure lane for SKT, who focused more on their solo lanes.
Play like Cloud9—but not like Cloud9
There’s precedent for that—just last summer, Cloud9 went from last place to the Worlds semifinals. The way they did it should be an inspiration to every other LCS team: By playing a distinct style centered around their specific strengths. They didn’t get distracted by scrims or metas. They did what they did best, and they did it better than nearly every other team in the world.
The point isn’t that 100 Thieves should copy Cloud9’s style draft-for-draft, play-for-play. It’s that they should stop being influenced by others. They have spent too much time looking at what others are doing and haven’t paid enough attention to themselves. That’s how you end up with Bang’s Viktor experiment vs. Liquid and whatever has happened to Ssumday’s champion pool.
The final indignity should be that Riven game. Riven is not a Ssumday champion—until Saturday, he had not played Riven competitively since season five. A superstar like Ssumday shouldn’t be copying the champion pools of young, untested rookies like FlyQuest’s Omran “V1per” Shoura, a noted Riven main. Hell, even V1per needs to stop playing Riven with so much reckless abandon.
It’s not that teams shouldn’t evolve and players shouldn’t learn new champions. The game has changed a lot over the years, and especially this year. But there was a reason they signed Ssumday in 2017 and Bang last year. In the race to improve, they can’t lose sight of what made their players special in the first place. 100 Thieves can still be as good as we thought they could be at the beginning of the year—they just need to remind themselves of who they are.
100 Thieves, Bang, LCS, esports, Champion pool, Cloud9, superstar, glue, carry.