Earlier this year, Korea’s legendary esports team T1 had a record-breaking 18-0 series score in the 2022 LCK Spring Split. After arriving at the playoffs, T1 took down Kwangdong Freecs and Gen.G with ease, granting themselves a 20-0 win streak, something we’ve never seen before in any top-tier League of Legends domestic league. A 20-0 win streak is a huge achievement and T1 demonstrated to be the most dominating team in the world, but how did they achieve this exactly?
T1 currently has one of the strongest line-ups we’ve ever seen in the history of competitive League of Legends. The lineup consists mostly of new and young players, their youngest player being Zeus who is 18-years old, and the oldest one is Faker at 25 years. Every single one of the players (except for Keria) has been playing under the T1 organization their entire career, this just proves that T1 has one of the best academy systems not only in Korea but in the world.
You can make a strong case for any of the 5 players being the main reason why they got a perfect split. Most experts would agree that Keria was the strongest player on the team during the 2022 LCK Spring Split, after all, he got the LCK MVP, something that is hard to achieve as a support player. But in reality, every single one of them played out of their minds, Gumayusi could be considered the best ADC in the entire world by the way he performed in every single one of his games.
We’ve seen that Faker’s career has had its ups and downs, but in this split, he showed why he is still considered the best League player in the history of the game, and will probably continue to be throughout the years. Faker doesn’t need to take the carry role in every game, he knows how to function perfectly as an enabler for the rest of his team and that’s something that not many mid laners can do. Faker’s flexibility is something worthy of admiration, he has evolved so much as a player in the past couple of years that it’s going to be a huge challenge for any other player to overcome Faker’s legacy.
In the end, it’s pretty safe to say that T1 achieved the perfect LCK run through not only strong individual performances but also one of the best team plays we’ve seen so far this year. This paired with the fact that unlike almost all of the teams in the LCK, they didn’t suffer any downtime due to the COVID pandemic, and that gave them a slight edge over the competition. T1 didn’t need to play with a substitute player in a single game, I’m not saying that they wouldn’t have been able to achieve a perfect run had they been affected by COVID, but it’s still a question that will remain unanswered. T1’s 2022 LCK Spring Split run will go down the history books of League of Legends esports and it’s amazing to see that it wasn’t only because 1 or 2 players performed well, but it was the result of the entire organization’s efforts.
