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Team Liquid put up a fight during Week 8, Day 2 of the North American League of Legends Championship Series, but Cloud9 left Los Angeles on Saturday with a 2-1 series win.
Team Liquid (4-12, 11-27 match record) and its recent roster moves created even more questions around the starting jungle position after Saturday's series. In a controversial move, jungler Joshua "Dardoch" Hartnett was added to the team, presumably to start over Kim "Reignover" Yeu-jin in order for mid laner Son "Mickey" Young-min to eventually play. However, against Cloud9, the team looked significantly stronger with Reignover at the helm than it did with Dardoch.
In Liquid's Game 1 win, the team made strong mid-game map movements to pull even with Cloud9's potent splitpushing. Cloud9 (9-6, 22-17 match record) didn't help its case by giving Liquid its dream draft with AD carry Chae "Piglet" Gwang-jin on Kog'Maw and the entire team built around keeping him alive and swinging in fights.
When Dardoch came into Game 2, he took Gragas into the jungle, but seemed to take away Liquid's macro edge. Cloud9's draft, meanwhile, indicated it was starting to take Liquid seriously as it gave mid laner Nicolaj "Jensen" Jensen his comfort Orianna to carry on.
It would've been easy to write off Dardoch's poor performance in a Game 2 loss if Cloud9 could again keep Liquid overwhelmed in the macro game for Game 3, but Reignover wouldn't allow that. While Cloud9 eventually came away with the win, things are surprisingly looking good for Liquid's starting lineup. That being said, nothing showed that Mickey doesn't deserve playing time when he eventually makes his way to North America. The situation with multiple import slots will be a tough puzzle for Liquid to solve, as it's not clear if Dardoch can be considered an upgrade or even on par with Reignover in the jungle if Liquid is serious about winning games.
At least in this series, it's clear that Reignover's version of Team Liquid is the stronger of the two.
It can't be stressed how much Jensen carried Cloud9 to a series win, though. Liquid's early bottom-side pressure kept C9's AD carry Zachery "Sneaky" Scuderi down on multiple occasions, so it fell to Jensen to keep Cloud9 rolling. With massive Command: Shockwaves tearing through Liquid, C9's shift from splitpushing to deathball-teamfighting worked wonders. From directionless and unsure in Game 1 to decisive and explosive in Games 2 and 3, Cloud9 hit its stride just in time as Liquid threatened to pull off a miracle upset. Luckily for Cloud9, its remaining schedule doesn't get much harder than this, so it has time to iron out any issues it has before playoffs.
Cloud9 returns to the Rift at 6 p.m. on Sunday at 3 p.m. ET to take on FlyQuest while Team Liquid will next face FlyQuest at 6 p.m. ET on Aug. 5.