Tony Gray · @Zikzlol
9th May 2015 from TwitLonger
Why TSM did so poorly at MSI
When it gets closer and closer to an important event, you realize that you need to audit your team and work around your weaknesses and focus entirely on your strengths to have the best shot at winning. If TSM has a 50% success rate in top side pressure, that's not good enough, it won't work against world class teams. As TSM usually does during crunch time, they put all of their eggs in the Bjergsen basket, as they should, because it's been proven to have the highest success rate. The true problem lies in the when they break this identity that has worked for them for so long.
When meta's change, champions become more and less popular in the priority list. For example, a champion that is strong for Marin, may not be the champion that is strongest for Dyrus based on playstyle, which changes the champion priority list for each team, but some teams fail to realize this and just blindly follow what other regions see as the best without thinking if it's the right pick for the person. Putting Dyrus on champions and in matchups that rely on pressure, when he's given the least gold and least support from his team, will obviously just be set to fail, regardless of how broken the champion can be (aka Hecarim).
The goal of every team playing against a team at MSI is to abuse the enemy team's "identity" to gain a strategic advantage, pointing out weaknesses such as Dyrus for TSM (left on an island, on average buys just about the least amount of wards in the world for top laners which opens up the top side of the map) or Steelback for FNC (weak play, easily gankable which opens up the bottom side of the map). The teams are looking to abuse that, and that's why the bans from most teams toward TSM was trying to break that identity of TSM where Dyrus can get away with murder because he's playing supportive or tank champions like Sion/Maokai/Lulu.
The fatal flaw from TSM this tournament was that other teams can easily break their identity, but mainly they broke their own identity by themselves. Putting Bjergsen on low impact champions that can't carry the pace of the game, and also putting him on champions that allow the enemy to abuse his weakness of being easily ganked is just poor strategy. Ultimately, TSM had a very easy to abuse flaw in their play that everyone recognized, and then had poor strategic choices that strayed away from player strengths and weaknesses.