Out Of Playoffs and Back To The Drawing Board - How Can These NA Teams Bounce Back?

The playoff weekend saw half of the teams end their 2020 season after being knocked out of the unrelenting bracket play. With the post-season starting early for them, they will have to get back to the drawing board and decide which strategy to choose for next season. Picking from the full menu of old players and new, those teams will enter the off-season with a strategy in mind. Last week, we got to speculate on the type of off-season the Houston Outlaws, London Spitfire and Vancouver Titans will have. This time around we look at the Toronto Defiant, Boston Uprising, Dallas Fuel, Los Angeles Gladiators, and the Paris Eternal.

While I acknowledge that more goes into roster-building than merely considering the competitive aspects such as team profiles built for marketing purposes, these factors won’t be fully considered here.

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Toronto Defiant - A Highly Contested Team Identity

The season for the Defiant, in terms of the outcome, went about as well as most pundits predicted them to in the pre-season. Just a slightly more detailed look reveals that competitively speaking, not much went as planned with management, players, and coaches retiring over the season. Moreover, the expected crown jewel of the Defiant, Lane “Surefour” Roberts played less than half the season. Andreas "Logix" Berghmans played another season of being among the best if not the best player on a mediocre roster, a fate he simply doesn’t seem to be able to escape from. 

Recuperating their losses, the Defiant turned to seasoned leadership in their pickups of Seb "numlocked" Barton and Harrison "Kruise" Pond, trying to bring in fresh blood in Thomas "zYKK" Hosono who proved to be a very solid and smart component of the roster that allowed them to have a decent exit from the season with his Pharah.

The challenges that the Defiant face in the off-season is that they will likely have to compete with several big players in the scene for the best Western talent if they do indeed want to stick to their English-speaking ways. The Gladiators are known to have deep pockets, and as General Manager and Head coach David "dpei" Pei said in the pre-season, their goal is to become the go-to Western roster in the Overwatch League. A considerable amount of teams in the Overwatch League are running hybrid rosters, and will also require updates to their line-up in the off-season. With a dying tier 2 scene, especially in North America, the source of new talent is slowly running dry and the competition, therefore, increases on the ones making it through. However, with teams expected to lean out their rosters for season 4, several free agents could become available, opening up unforeseen opportunities for the Defiant to win the off-season.

The most important aspect for the Defiant to go into the off-season will be to find or promote a capable coach to take charge. Talking about market realities with experts in the scene, this is a challenging task these days and there aren’t many coaches left in Contenders which could be slotted in with high confidence. Just about the only idea that has me excited is to outright steal from the church of crusty and bring Jae "Junkbuck" Choi up in a head coach position for another team. 

Arguably only numlocked, zYKK, Logix and perhaps Brady “Agilities” Girardi have proven their value and form a solid core to start the building around, though it is for said new coach to decide which direction the team will be taking and where they see potential in the existing players. To me, everyone else is either destined to leave the roster or should likely be asked to play for their roster position in tryouts.

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Boston Uprising - Is A Paradigm Shift In The Cards?

The Boston Uprising are in the precarious situation in which they are at the conceptual level a team that wants to do a lot with very little and unfortunately, there’s now a team in the Overwatch League that does it way better than them. If I’m an underappreciated player and get approached by the Uprising and the Valiant, who would I pick based on the reputation that these two teams have gained for themselves? Exactly. Ever since the departure of Dae-hee "Crusty" Park, the magic is gone, and there was seldom more than a flash in the pan to make us believe otherwise.

If the Uprising continue their economic roster-building approach, then we should expect Sang-min "Myunb0ng" Seo to leave for a good chunk of money with Tae-hee "Jerry" Min having a slight chance to go elsewhere too. For everyone else that has been with this roster since the start of the season, it’s unlikely that they will be able to transfer elsewhere. Rather, it appears likely that a bunch of players will be let go, few with the opportunity to go to another team.

We don’t know how well Boston’s approach is working for them from a business perspective, and whether a rethinking of their entire approach is feasible. Perhaps they will find one of the best coaches in Overwatch once more and they will find back to season 1 magic, but the probability of those scenarios is slim. Is there another well of underappreciated players to tab that could give them a scouting edge? Given the state of tier 2, this is also unlikely.

There are no sensible predictions as to which direction the Uprising may go. If season two and three weren’t enough to falsify this concept, then the success likely falls on the business side of things with little reason to alternate. Either this organisation experiences a paradigm shift or their fans may have to go another season suffering from a lack of success. 

Dallas Fuel - Can they finally get serious?

A lot has been said and written about this team and thus we won’t flog the dead horse much more. The Fuel didn’t have the season that they wanted, but the one they set themselves up to have.

Looking at their team from the outside, I find myself once again with reason to believe that things will get better in the off-season, though I admit that we’ve thought this before plenty of times. Let’s get some facts out of the way: The Dallas Fuel are one of the teams investing the most in their Overwatch League team, and therefore are always a significant contender in each negotiation for a top tier player and crucially, also for each coach. With Mike “hastr0” Rufail stepping back as a CEO, and getting involved more with the competitive side of things, I expect this to be a major boon in a hands-on approach with the Fuel. Esports history speaks a relatively clear verdict on hastr0 and it shows him to be a solid team builder when he has the time to influence decisions on a team level.

A lot of shackling contracts will end in October and if the Fuel stay on their budget, they will have a lot of resources to play with to turn the team around. However, they have a reputation to fix and respect to earn and a lot of that will fall with the vision of whichever head coach they will decide to appoint.  For me, only Kim “Doha” Dong-ha and Stefan “Onigod” Fiskerstrand should be definitive players to plan the next season with, with William “Crimzo” Hernandez being the next in line. Everyone else either is surely gone or very likely to be if the Fuel want to make a claim for a North American top team.

For them, it will be crucial to become active as early as possible and secure players and staff that will attract highly contested players in the off-season. The promise of a top salary is not as enticing for a young top player when competitors are close to the offer and have a better competitive outlook.

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Los Angeles Gladiators - What's even the problem?

The reasons as to why the Gladiators underperformed below their expectations is still largely a mystery. Top Western coaching, a deep roster, and great resources should’ve bought more success this year than an early exit from the playoff bracket. Not even the possible breaking points of this roster that were pointed out during the pre-season such as the inconsistent nature of Ji-hyeok "birdring" Kim’s play or the unknown quantities of their rookies ever really became a problem. Where do we even begin to see probable fixes?

If the Gladiators want to indeed continue down the line of becoming the strongest only Western roster, would that really mean they’d let birdring go after the season he has just had? A Western side-grade is likely only to be found in the likes of Kai "KSP" Collins which will run up the tab quickly. Perhaps a player like Niclas "sHockWave" Jensen could fit in as we can expect him to be far from his peak yet.

Perhaps it is blasphemy to a Gladiators fan, but running the mind of dpei in emulation, I think that this might be the off-season in which the team departs from their stable backline and look elsewhere. Heavy hitters will be entering the market and I see the Gladiators jumping at the opportunity.

Paris Eternal - No complacency for the overachievers

What a marvellous season in comparison to their projections the Paris Eternal have had. Ranked as one of the bottom five teams by most experts, the Eternal got as high as to win the Summer Showdown and finish in the third North American seed in the regular season. Integrating both fresh French talent like Brice "FDGod" Monsçavoir and veterans like Benjamin "BenBest" Dieulafait, Nicolas "NiCOgdh" Moret, and Terence "SoOn" Tarlier on top of an incredible set of rookies has worked like a charm for the Eternal and a lot of credit has to go to the coaching staff. 

However, history teaches us that complacency is not enough to maintain a top position in the league and the Eternal will have to make adjustments to their roster for season 4. Of course, we can expect Paris to not be done in their trajectory of improvement with this current roster, but we have to remind ourselves that even teams like the Shock have realised that not becoming active in the transfer market means to likely fall behind their competition. 

The beauty of the position that the Eternal is in is that they’ve shown to run a hybrid roster at an incredible level, allowing them to look into all kinds of Contenders markets to find new talent to advance their roster.

Especially the existing Element Mystic connection is exciting as the South Korean talent forge has once again assembled a team that plays incredibly well even into top tier Asian OWL teams. The slight bummer is that most of their players won’t be eligible for next year, though the odd piece should at least get a tryout.

Additionally, we can not discount the untapped potential that is the European Contenders region and given their proximity of this market and preestablished connections through their former academy roster, there too are exciting prospects to be looked at, first and foremost on the dominant British Hurricane. 

As we move up the ranks, it will get harder and harder to come up with obvious solutions or probable paths these teams will take. A lot will depend on the nature of the transfer market during this off-season. A talent dispersion of sorts due to a general downsizing of team budgets could change a lot of the aforementioned plans as teams react in accordance with the available talent at their respective price points. 

Images via Blizzard Entertainment