Dignitas asserted itself as one of the preeminent organizations in the North American League Championship Series on Saturday when it upset Cloud9 in the first round of the Summer Split playoffs and defeated them in a 3-1 series.
It's important to state just how historic a victory this is for Dignitas. Only three teams have ever won the NA LCS - Team Solomid, Cloud9, and Counter Logic Gaming - and the latter has only done so once. Team Solomid vs. Cloud9 is, in many ways, the rivalry that has long defined the NA LCS, and the two have met in the finals more splits than not. In fact, Cloud9 has never lost to a team other than Team Solomid during the playoffs in the history of the organization, at least until now. Team Dignitas didn't just upset analysts predictions with its victory, it upset the very flow of history.
And did it ever upset predictions. Before the match there was nary an analyst in the world that was willing to take Dignitas' side as the team was both untested and reliant on a couple of players that have a penchant for underperforming when it matters most: mid laner Jang "Keane" Lee-Young and jungler Lee "Shrimp" Byeong-honn. While the rest of the team has proven themselves to be amongst the best in their role in the NA LCS, both Keane and Shrimp have had no such distinction, and the consensus was that the two would be the weight that would drag Dignitas down to the point of no return.
They could not have been more wrong. Both of the two had a breakout day, and rather than underperforming the duo both made a showing strong enough to get them considered for player of the series. Shrimp, in particular, started the day off swinging as he put in one of the best Jarvan IV games in recent memory at the start of the series. Analysts expected that Shrimp would get read by the more veteran jungler Juan "Contractz" Garcia, and they could not have been more wrong, as Shrimp was on the front foot for almost the entire series, barring the disastrous Game 3 that gave Cloud9 a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark series. Those same analysts would likely have also said that Keane wouldn't be able to match Nicolaj "Jensen" Jensen without the counterpicks that he so relied upon, and that too was proven wrong throughout the series, where Keane looked to be the most consistent performer on the team despite blind picking "traditional" mid laners such as Syndra and Taliyah.
Cloud9's Summer Split is now over, but its season may not be, depending on how the rest of playoffs play out. Team Dignitas, on the other hand, will go on to face either Immortals or Team SoloMid next week, depending on the result of Sunday's match between Team EnVyUs and Counter Logic Gaming.