Why some Pro League teams are throwing in the towel
Rosters behind on points are unlikely to catch up halfway through the first Pro League split.
Blink and you might have missed it: we’re halfway through the regular season’s first split, and the ALGS starts up again this weekend.
I’ve been busy building out Dot’s coverage of the ALGS with my colleagues, as well as working on some longer investigative pieces and some fun new ideas for the newsletter.
In North America, we’ve all been impressed with the incredible results of the former Intel team, now representing all of Esports Arena, and everyone else at the top: Spacestation Gaming, NRG, Sentinels, and Cloud9. Esports Arena is currently in first place overall, and lest we forget, they came into the league through open qualifiers and have since absolutely stomped on lots of the teams that got invites.
Juggernauts of the first year of the ALGS circuit have been having a much harder go of it. After bad performances in the first two weekends of league play, fan favorites Complexity and TSM had to conjure up some huge moves on day three (TSM’s brought to you by an appropriately old-school Wraith portal play) to put themselves back into contention with year two’s hottest teams.
But not every familiar face in Apex is crushing it in the Pro League.
Halfway through the season, teams that haven’t been able to notch a decent performance are throwing in the towel. Others are throwing players under the bus.
I recruited Jevvy Media, the community fixture you might know from his viral tweet about who belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of Apex, to write about the implications of roster churn in Pro League. Expect that post soon. But in the meantime, let’s take a quick look at the biggest underperformers of the NA Pro League so far:
Benchwarmers
The squad Madness formed after leaving CLG is in 30th place overall and was in danger of relegation to open qualifiers until they imploded from within.
Senior Service
Nokokopuffs, the ex-CLG pro now signed to TSM as a content creator, secured an invitation to the Pro League on the good graces of a team that was formerly signed to Elevate Esports. The roster looked like this back when the invited Pro League teams were announced:
Elevate dropped that team before Pro League started, and Nokokopuffs wriggled in to replace Viizay.
But after three days of competition, Senior Service was in 29th place out of 40 teams.
CLG
The brand-new roster CLG picked up for Pro League is a bit out of their depth among the best teams in North American Apex. Perhaps not everyone expected this untested team to crush it, but they’re in 39th place, having notched a single point over three days of competition, and it’s looking like they might be on their way out of Pro League entirely.
Torrent
Euriece and the gang are struggling as well, replacing Rkn (CORRECTION: Rkn is still on the active roster, Hill has stepped down) with Knoqd after grabbing just two points in three days.
100 Thieves
Fans of more established orgs were salty after 100 Thieves, at that time playing for Kungarna, won the ALGS Championship. Critics called it a fluke. Now they’re being proven right, as 100 Thieves haven’t done much since they got signed and have only managed to notch a total of five points since the start of Pro League.
Unlike the other teams I’ve mentioned so far, that still puts them in contention for a decent performance, if not the playoffs. But they’ll need to step it up in the back half of the split, and if anything their results have been getting worse: they notched a big goose egg in the last set of matches.
We might see a lot more roster movement toward the end of this split, as teams do the math and fall out of contention for a decent paycheck or face the harsh reality of another grueling open qualifer.
Until next week!
FYI, Knoqd is replacing Hill, not Rkn, for Torrent