Team Liquid: Coming into this week Team Liquid is considered the best team in the LCS. They are the expected winner of both matches. Everyone is already putting them as top two and going to worlds. So what should they be focusing on at this point in the season? Consistency and resilience. We know the meta is going to change by worlds, Team Liquid figuring out how to maintain what they are doing through the game changing is going to be important. We also know that once worlds hits the competition gets a lot harder. Figuring out what core parts of their game they want to focus on can help them figure out what is and isn’t working once scrims and stage games get a lot harder

Lyons: This is the first week back with Inspired for Lyons. There’s two competing expectations for them coming into this weekend of games. They are going to look slow out the gates since they need to reintegrate Inspired. Or they are going to look a lot crisper now that Inspired is back. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. There’s a lot that will slot back into place for the team like how they communicate and how Inspired controls the team. But there will be moments where because they aren’t as fresh on how they want to play the game they may be a bit slower than normal.

Cloud9: Cloud9 still feels like they are in a weird no-mans land for their expectations as we approach playoffs. It feels like Tactical and Loki didn’t solve any problems but just changed the way the problems look. The hope is that behind the scenes their scrims are better and they are feeling more confident as a team. As strange as it seems I am not putting much stock into this weekend. Their goal is worlds so to me that means this week has to be about learning where their failure points against the other top teams are. Then spending the next few weeks fixing those up to reach top three.

Shopify Rebellion: Shopify Rebellion is the odd duck of the four this weekend. No one expected them to be sitting at a 3-1 record coming into the matches. I think as a team they need to be coming into the games and not view themselves as underdogs or the expected losers. They have improved a lot since Zeyzal has joined. The team continues to look more coordinated and everyone seems to be getting on the same page. Zinie especially has been more in-sync with the team. This foundational level of communication and direction is important for them and this week will be a good test to see how consistent they are at it.