Gen.G Esports will face off against Edward Gaming on Sunday in the League of Legends World Championship semifinals, and the match may revolve around the bottom lane more than any other position. EDG bot laner, Park “Viper” Do-hyeon, is a recent League of Legends Pro League import who started his career on the much hyped Griffin and earned a spot on the First All Pro Team in his second split in the LPL. Gen.G’s bot laner, Park “Ruler” Jae-hyuk, rose to prominence during his Worlds 2017 championship run with Samsung Galaxy and has been a top player in the position ever since.
Both are integral to their team’s success as EDG play through bot to take Dragon control and skirmish over the objective, while Gen.G like to play slow and scale, which is always helped by Dragon control and a solid bot laner that does not get caught out. So with these differing playstyles, lets look at how do these two matchup against each other statistically and see if those numbers can be used to predict the upcoming matchup.
EDG vs. Gen.G resources given to bot lane
How often a team gives a certain position resources is a good indicator of how they like to play the game. This can be skewed between metas and positions, but is a decent indicator of how a team prioritizes its players and power levels across multiple games. For EDG, Viper sits at the bottom half of the table out of all LPL bot laners in the regular season when it comes to gold share with only 25.6% average share of his team’s gold. As for Ruler, the world champion averages 27.4% of his teams gold share, giving him the highest gold share of any bot laner in the League of Legends Champions Korea.
At Worlds 2021 so far, Viper has seen a dip in priority in his team’s gold share, only garnering 24% of his team’s total gold which is less than in the LPL regular season. Ruler’s, in contrast, sits at the same number which is the highest among the bot laners remaining in the tournament. Out of the entire field of bot laners at Worlds 2021, Ruler has the third highest gold share, with only Ian Victor “FBI” Huang and Steven “Hans sama” Liv taking more of their team’s gold. Viper has the third lowest gold share of any bot laner at the event, only taking more resources than surprise substitute Louis “Bean” Schmitz and Wong “Unified” Chun Kit.
But is this indicative of anything concrete in terms of their matchup in the semifinals? Not really. This is more of an indication of how either team prioritizes mid-game gold share. While Gen.G tend to throw Ruler in the mid lane and take waves to scale into the late game, EDG prefer to have Viper with the team pushing together or looking for a pick to start a fight or take an objective.
EDG vs. Gen.G kill and damage percentage
Gold is not the only metric players are assessed by when it comes to positional performance. Doing damage and getting kills are another decent indicator of skill, especially when gold share is taken into account. For their regular summer split averages, Viper had a decent 26.9% of his team’s kills despite his low gold share. As for Ruler, the Gen.G marksman had 30.2% of his team’s kills averaged across the summer split. As for their damage share during the same period of time, Viper averaged 29.3% of his team’s damage while Ruler averaged a whopping 31.3%. For both statistics, the two bot laners where in the top half of the table compared to their regional league counterparts.
At Worlds, the two players have lower averages and are closer together on the table with Viper averaging 25.7% and Ruler averaging 24.6% of his team’s kills. As for damage percentage, the two players are No. 7 and 8 with Ruler edging out Viper with 25.5% average of his team’s damage at the tournament and the LPL player doing 25% for his team.
In terms of their matchup on Sunday, these numbers show that Viper overperforms in comparison to the gold he is given in a given match. While that is not a surprising statistic given how good of a teamfighter he is, it confirms that he is still an important part of EDG’s success. On Gen.G’s end, it just continues the line of thinking from the gold share section, Ruler is Gen.G’s win condition and he does well with the amount of resources he is given.
EDG vs. Gen.G early bot lane matchup
But who really cares about these mid and late-game centric numbers, will fans see some action in the bot lane in the early laning phase? Potentially.
In the LCK summer split, Ruler participated in first blood in 15% of Gen.G’s games. Ruler was only a part of first blood 1.6% of the time in the LPL. As for early matchups against their regional league opponents, Ruler averaged up 54 gold at 10 minutes across the summer split while Viper averaged down 98 gold.
At Worlds 2021 however, Ruler’s average first blood participation has been 18% while Viper sits at 9%. As for gold difference at 10 minutes at the international event, Rule still averages a positive 91 gold difference while Viper still averages down about 89 gold.
Based off of these early game numbers, it might be safe to say that there will not be a lot of action in the early stages in the bottom lane. Ruler likes to stick with his support, either in lane or roaming together, and Viper is usually on an island while his lane partner is off at another portion of the map. The two could still scrap in the early minutes of the game, but the numbers point to a more docile laning phase as the two build items for the fights to come.
From the numbers used to quantify this matchup, its seems like Ruler will come out ahead in terms of individual performance, while Viper will stick with his team and provide constant damage in the backline. Ruler is a statistical monster, which is easy to achieve when given the amount of gold he gets each game. And Viper is more of a team-centric player, doing his job as a bot laner while also raining down damage while skirmishing. While the two may not go at it in the laning phase, fans should expect the two to contest Dragon and force fights around the objective in the early stages of the game.
The statistics used were gathered from Oracle’s Elixir and Games of Legends.
Published: Oct 29, 2021 09:00 am