TSM are currently 0-4 in the 2022 League Championship Series spring split; the worst start to a season in the organization’s history. After going 0-2 in the first week and then experiencing a second winless week, TSM are starting to make personnel changes and Edward “Tactical” Ra noted that the team atmosphere is growing more tense.
“This past week, the environment wasn’t the best,” TSM bot laner Tactical said. “It could’ve been way better.”
Tactical’s description marks a notable shift from Huni’s explanation last week, where he acknowledged that, though they were stressed, they were also confident they’d improve enough by summer to attend the League of Legends World Championship 2022.
Tactical described the team as “angry-motivated,” noting that their frustration in their losing streak acted as the propeller for their improvement. He said that TSM used that motivation to adapt and plan for their fourth game.
“We had a crystal clear plan on what we wanted to do [in Game 4], and we just fumbled it,” Tactical said about how the team discussed each step of the game in detail before they got on stage. “We prepped this exact scenario, so everyone knew what the goal was and what we were trying to do going into the game. No one had to explain what we were going to do to each other during the game.”
Unfortunately for the struggling org, they made too many errors in their execution, leading to their fourth loss.
Errors happen in every League game, even for the best teams in the world. But, when TSM doesn’t execute on something, it can be difficult for them to repair the damage due their language differences.
“In terms of trying to sync up on ideas during the game that we didn’t discuss before, [everyone speaking English] helps a lot,” Tactical explained. Since TSM doesn’t currently have that, they’ve have to “work on our basics and fundamentals” before they get into “more complicated stuff.”
For example, their failed bot gank in Game 4 may not have happened if they had better fundamentals to set up the wave properly or if they could communicate faster in the moment. Perhaps they could have either called off the play entirely or recalculated their execution, given the complexity of the situation.
Tactical remained positive for the team’s future, however, even after their fourth loss in a row.
“If we can keep up the pace of how much improvement we made from Saturday to Sunday night, we can do well,” he said. “Personally, in terms of confidence, I’m still fine. I know, individually, I’m still a really good player. I know other people on my team are as well.”
He also acknowledged the team’s obvious mistakes, while noting the many improvements behind the scenes and in their comms that weren’t as evident from the outside.
“We’ve been seeing very slow and steady improvement in scrims,” he said. “There was one week where we only won one game of scrims.” Tactical noted that they were winning considerably more and said their stage games showed improvement, too, even though they weren’t yet able to find a win.
A NEW ERA OF #TSM
The new squad, our off-season journey, our LCS debut. Welcome to Season 8 of TSM Legends.
🎬: https://t.co/FjIjFs25GL pic.twitter.com/pQJUzCeCeb
— TSM (@TSM) February 11, 2022
TSM analyst Jack “Kayys” Kayser recently tweeted that their fans shouldn’t be too worried and that the team’s issues “will be resolved.” He also hinted in a comment on that tweet that their main focus was to resolve everything by summer split. “Spring will not effect summer standings so more so an improvement split,” he said.
A few days after their fourth loss and Kayys’ tweet, TSM announced a roster change, promoting their Academy support Wang “Yursan” Sheng-Yu to the LCS in place of Wei “Shenyi” Zi-Jie. They made this change in order to improve communications and make for a more suitable environment for Shenyi to grow.
TSM and Yursan will look to secure their first regular season win against Immortals Progressive and Cloud9 this weekend, who each sit at 1-3 and 3-1, respectively.
Published: Feb 17, 2022 10:52 am