c9 has won every game besides against LOUD, and that was a 1-2 with a still pretty fresh roster. their future games are against SEN, mibr, lev, and kru. kru and mibr are probably free wins and lev has shows cracks in their gameplay recently, so if they manage to beat SEN I’m expecting them to be 2nd seed minimum to Tokyo.
kinda hoping for this timeline, i’d love to see more T2/T3 talent picked up by franchised orgs. runi and jake were perfect additions.
C9 is really a showcase of what good coaching will do for a team. MCE was essentially forced to drop the best player of last year and was still able to turn it around, train up a new IGL, and find a cracked smokes player from the literal gutter. He's undeniably a goated coach, not just in the Americas, but worldwide. Really hoping we see C9 at tokyo, even if it means no NRG/Lev.
if teams stay how they've been atm, i'd say LOUD, C9, and SEN. lev wont make it if they don't fix the holes in their strats, which there's still time to fix. nrg is too unpredictable rn, they look better with ardiis jett only but their roles might be impossible to fix at this point.
playoffs will probably be: LOUD, c9, SEN, LEV, NRG, and Furia, but 100T and EG are the dark horses
So they face
100T
Furia
Loud
EG
Out of those teams, I think they are expected to lose to Loud. Assuming they also suffer one other defeat (which I think is probable considering they're really not a tier above 100T or Furia, and they've seemed inconsistent), that gives them a 4-5 record.
Another way to think about it is:
Honestly, that loss to MIBR really fucked NRG imo, and this NRG vs 100T game is REALLYYY important to their playoff hopes.
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