Video: The Top 5 Times NA Esports Took the L and Disappointed Us All

Look, the fact is we don’t have enough fingers on our hands to count all the times NA esports took the L internationally.

And the worst part is, they always seem to do just enough to get us feeling hopeful before letting us down again. It’s not enough for North America to lose at international events. They have to do it in style.

So being a fan of North American esports takes real dedication. It also takes love and a lot of patience.

These are the Top 5 Times NA Esports Took the L and dashed our hopes to pieces.

No. 5: Cloud9 at MSI 2021

No. 5 brings us to a recent memory where NA took the L — at least if you’re a League of Legends fan — with Cloud9’s utter failure in Iceland at the 2021 Mid-Season Invitational. 

C9 started the early stage a bit slowly, losing their first two games before warming up to the new meta. But, to every NA fan’s relief, they found their footing and won the next four straight. That’s when things truly went sour.

Cloud9 went on a long losing streak in the second stage of the event, racking up a depressing 1-5 record. But then…they beat RNG, giving fans reason to hope once again. They still had a chance to advance to the knockouts. But, they lost to Pentanet.gg; a team that literally doesn’t have a supported region. This ruined the rest of their event and essentially secured their elimination. A single player’s salary on Cloud9 is more than all the salaries on  Pentanet.gg combined. Yet, they found a way to lose to them and bring shame to all of NA.

No. 4: Arteezy getting cliffed

This crushing disappointment sends us over to the 2019 Dota 2 Chongqing Major. Evil Geniuses lost 0-2 to Team Secret in the lower finals.

Evil Geniuses were one of the three teams favored to win the whole tournament and they almost made it to the grand finals. So, the problem isn’t that they had a terrible tournament; it’s that, in their final series, fate intervened and sent them home as a meme.

What are we talking about? They got outplayed in Game 1 but Game 2 was tragic. Arteezy, one of the Dota greats, was set up to carry EG. But, in the final moment, Secret used the hero ability Vacuum to trap him on a cliff. In Dota, players literally cannot get down from a cliff without backing, which Secret wouldn’t let him do. He was stuck there, forced to watch his team get slaughtered below before losing the game.

No. 3: Team Liquid at MSI 2019

This time, we’ll take a look at Team Liquid’s 2019 MSI run; the second time NA made it to the MSI finals and the third time NA took the L.

Maybe you’re wondering how NA making it to the grand finals of an international event could have been a failure. Well, that’s because they got swept in the fastest ever international best-of-five. They never came close to putting up a fight.

After defeating IG — the most recent World Champions — in the semis, Team Liquid found G2 in the finals. It was the NA vs. EU rivalry matchup and, at the time, it was the best team that NA had ever put together. Their roster had two former world champions! And, the other three were each the best in their role domestically. However, they still got obliterated in the finals. Not to be too savage or anything but…it looked like a bunch of silver players onstage.

Watch the full “Top 5 Times NA Esports Took the L” and more great videos on Upcomer’s Youtube Page.

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