TLAW Spawn: “Fuck, I wish we had carried over some of those wins against T1 as well. We get the frustration.”
Q: It looked like TLAW was clipfarming DSG, to be honest. I don’t know if you saw it that way, but …
Spawn: Yeah, I mean, honestly, we kind of played for like 10 to 13 minutes seriously, and then let the demons inside win for the next, you know, 13 to 15 minutes in each of the games.
The guys were having a bit of fun. That’s good. We like to play with high energy, but at the same time, we do need to control it sometimes because, you know, we can’t be giving 1000 gold shutdowns to Orianna. Otherwise the game can become tricky.
Q: Core had an insane play on Leona in Game 1 — at the bot tri-bush, he went in 1v4, forward-stepped Nautilus hook, and sat in the middle of everyone to set up a play that won the game instantly. Even when TL24’ and 25’ were at their best, I never saw him play like this. He looks unbelievable right now.
Spawn: Yeah, it’s a completely different style to be honest. With the Impact line-up, even when we were insane in summer, our whole game plan was to get control of the game however we could get control of the game, and then strangle you out macro-wise.
I would say even though the games ended quickly, it was more like a methodical, brutal way of playing against us. Whereas now, when we get a lead, everyone’s gonna push their individual advantage and we’re gonna look for what we call “cracks” in the game, and we need to get really good at identifying what those cracks are, [whether that’s] playing into flashless targets, identifying that we have a certain zone that we can force them to fight in, whatever it might be.
And then, we expect people to generate action by making outplays. You know, [in your example], they overextended into bottom lane, and Core has to get the party started — because otherwise they’re just going to turn around and leave, right? So he has to go in there, he needs to make a couple of seconds of time.
Then, Jose goes in, perfectly spaces, hits an EQ, buffers the Yone ultimate with his Jarvan R. And then we just clean up the fight, only one person dies, we kill everyone. So, I mean, that’s the kind of game that we want to play. We identified it really early on in the year.
You know, it took us a while to get here because honestly, it takes a lot of courage to play like that on stage because if it goes wrong, you look like idiots. But, I think we’re finally there now as a team and we’re just going to continue the momentum.
Q: It’s a trust thing too, right? It’s just scary to me, though, because even though I think that this style is the best way to challenge teams internationally, it’s harder to believe that our teams will have this confidence against teams like T1 and BLG.
Spawn: I don’t know about that, because we actually felt like we did it well against T1 and then lost the game in macro areas, which is like where we should be good, right?
That’s where I put in a lot of work lately. Yeon keeps saying it, but I’m giving the team one or two different little things like, our entries are too quick or our weak side vision isn’t good enough 45 seconds before objective spawn or whatever it is. We’re just giving each other mini goals to make sure that our macro game stays on point. That’s my job as the coach because that’s where I’ve always been, in my opinion, one of the better coaches in the West.
So if we just continue to build on that side of our game- I actually don’t think we fell down individually. In fact, Morgan had a couple of insane performances against Doran the first time we played against T1. We’ve seen Quid do it in the past, we’ve seen Yeon do it in the past. I think individually we trust each other, and everyone trusts Jose. That guy just has the safest hands in the LCS to be honest, if he’s in a situation where he needs to play micro well to win a fight, Jose I feel like is actually maybe the best player in the region.
We feel like we have the players to do it, we just gotta put the macro game behind it as well. That’s why today, it’s fine, you can have happy games like “welcome to the circus.” We do our best T1 impression, but really what we’re trying to work on is kind of the opposite of what we’re doing. We know we can smash people. Now we gotta figure out how to get that later, then hold onto it and be a little bit cleaner with it.
Q: It’s more than a little frustrating to me, honestly, that Jose isn’t in conversations for being the best jungler in the West with Yike at the moment. Inspired isn’t playing and Skewmond’s been up-and-down — Jose’s been hard carrying every game and hasn’t gotten credit.
Spawn: Yeah, it’s interesting because we definitely think Jose is better than Yike. We already played against KC. We’re pretty confident how we match up against that team. And I would say there are some people, you know, people will point to Yeon especially, who is playing way better now than what he was playing at MSI.
So it’s not like MSI was peak TL and nothing could improve from there — that’s absolutely not the case. We were still finding our identity. In fact, that tournament helped us find it and we were still waiting for individual players like Core and Yeon to step up and play to their maximum potential. They were playing good, but they just weren’t playing at the level that we know they can play at, whereas I would say they’re getting closer to it now.
Back on the Jose thing, he’s definitely a great jungler in the West. We’re really happy to have him on our team. He’s also a great teammate, brings a lot to the team environment. I think that he is a really good player. I do think people are giving NA players more flowers, to be completely honest. I have seen the narrative start to shift online. I don’t think it’s like “We’re going to go international and get embarrassed” — but I think there are a lot of people [thinking that] it’s really frustrating that we can’t carry it over against the East.
We feel that same frustration, so it’s not like we get annoyed at fans for saying things like, “This win against KC doesn’t matter because they can’t beat T1.” It’s like… it doesn’t not matter, but also, yeah, fuck, I wish we had carried over some of those wins against T1 as well. We get the frustration. I think that’s the best thing about our team.
People have probably seen it when we talk to media at the moment — we’re really in tune with what our identity as a region is, how we’re trying to play, and the excitement we’re trying to bring back to North America. All the players love the region, to be completely honest. You know, you have Quid deciding to stay in North America over going to Europe. You have Morgan deciding to re-sign at Team Liquid and keep a long contract here. And then you don’t have to speak about the love that Core has for North America.
He’s literally grown the region as an individual more than any player. He has to be seen as one of the GOATs of NA just for the amount of talent development he’s done within the ecosystem. We’re here. We are getting a little bit more respect. We’ve got to do better at Worlds, so that’s what our goal is. But I’m not one of those people that is like, “We’re unfairly criticized.”
We’re [being] fairly criticized — we haven’t beaten a decent team in too long. We had opportunities at MSI this year, EWC a couple of years ago. We should have converted one of those best-of series, in my opinion, so I’m frustrated too.
Q: Quid talked about how his mindset adjustment led to his snap change in level. Did Yeon have something similar, or was it a set of slow changes after MSI?
Spawn: No, I don’t think it was a really slow change. I think that for Yeon, there were a couple of things that were upsetting him. Our scrims weren’t the best, our structure wasn’t the best. I had taken a step back on a couple of things that I had done really well in the past, so he gave me some good feedback in the offseason.
Everyone sees me as the kind of head coach in charge of the environment, and stuff like that — [but] then Yeon is like, “Sometimes the most value you actually bring is like your reviews and your strategic knowledge of the game.” We’ve changed up how we’re doing that. Sam is giving the team way more flexibility in draft, he’s doing a hundred percent of drafts now.
I stepped back — too many cooks were cooking our drafts at that point — so Spookz is doing those. So I’d say we’ve made some good changes for the team and that’s made Yeon happy, and when the guy’s happy, he plays better. That’s, like, as simple as it can be.
I think Quid’s was a little bit more of a mind gap. Yeon’s was a little bit more like structurally, he thought the team wasn’t set up to succeed like it should be, and we’ve made some changes.
Q: Yeon has high standards. I like that guy.
Spawn: I really like him — *laughs* — I mean, it’s no secret. I’ve coached the guy for like what, six years now? This is my seventh year? I can’t even remember. […] Yeah, so I love the kid and he’s really honest. He does a good job with holding high standards, but he doesn’t expect anyone to do stuff that he can’t do himself. So it’s good to coach him.
Q: I asked Morgan about the stylistic gap between him/Thanatos and Dhokla, who consistently wins, even when he loses lane. He mentioned something interesting — if he wins his lane and does his job, he doesn’t care as much about the win or loss.
Spawn: They’re two very different players, is what you have to say there, and I think [they have] two different roles on their team. When we picked up Morgan, it was because we wanted to have carry potential out of the top lane, which is why when everyone was like, the recipe for Team Liquid to succeed is stick Morgan on weakside, I was like, wow, well, you guys obviously have not been in any of the internal meetings, because every metric we have is like the opposite of that. We need Morgan to be strong within the game. Whereas if you’re playing with like Saint and Berserker, you don’t necessarily need Dhokla to be strong in the game, especially if you’re playing with a jungler like Inspired that’s not gonna drop for the team and will expect someone like Dhokla to drop for the team.
So what I would say is, they understand their identity really well and they play to it really well, and I admire players like Dhokla that will do whatever it takes to get that win. I think Morgan’s [quote] is a little bit of a language gap — because if he lost like a full four weeks in a row, he would start changing his playstyle, which is what we’ve seen. Even with us, like we were losing, so then we had started leaning on picks like Ornn, K’sante a lot more in Split 2, and Morgan was dropping a lot more for the team to get ahead.
Q: At the time, it helped you guys win more.
Spawn: Yeah, in the short term, it definitely did. But did it make us look better as a team? I don’t know if it made us long-term look better as a team, because we got absolutely blasted by LYON in that final, and they’re a team that we have to be able to beat.
So in the short term, put a big bandaid on. In the long term, Morgan’s [has] the “every single player needs to go out there with the do their job” mentality. So if we’re picking these winning lanes for bottom and winning lanes for top, then they need to be the people that win the lane, translate into mid game, and then don’t make those ground breaking mistakes. So I understand the mindset. There have been some times where I’m like, “Morgan, you’re 30 CS ahead and you have teleport advantage and my bottom lane is getting dove. Why don’t you just teleport bottom lane and get a double kill and win me the game?”
So we are working on that part of the game, but I do think it’s just a little bit of a mindset difference between the two players. Not that saying that he’s right or wrong. He needs to drop it sometimes, but sometimes it’s okay.
Q: In reality, I guess, communication wouldn’t even be an issue for you guys — Core could always ask for help in Korean if Morgan misses something in-game.
Spawn: Genuinely, I say it all the time to them, but if Jose’s on his krugs and Quid’s like, “I’m just gonna duck top quickly and kill this guy on Ryze,” there’s no point saying that in English. Just say that in Korean. Quid and Morgan are going to communicate that 10 times better. And Jose doesn’t need to deal with it.
The part that Morgan needs to speak English for is not the in-game snap communications — he speaks fine English for that. It’s like when he needs to sit down with the team and be like, “I’m frustrated because our practice environment seems a little bit lax at the moment.” That’s where you need complicated English.
English within League of Legends is “Gank top, run away, do baron” — like this is not hard English to understand. The language barrier for me, as a coach, has never been an in-game language barrier. It’s more like out of game, how we get alignment, which I use a lot of translating software at the moment, which is like “These are all themes of the week” — and I’ll write them out in English and Korean just to make sure. Not even just for Morgan, like I think it helps Core, I think it helps Quid be like “I cannot mistake what my coach is saying right now.” There’s a lot of tools like that at the moment and we use them.
Transcription assistance from @sakaruii
Header Image Credit: Riot Games
