RLCS X: Winter Split (Week 5) Standout Players Of The Week
It seems the ground at DFH Stadium and Beckwith Park is too hard to play on, and we will have to wait until the new year for top tier Rocket League to resume. Fortunately, I still have one final edition of Standout Players Of The Week for you to read. Coming in at number five...
5. Luke “Amphis” Riddell - Ground Zero Gaming
The first player from Oceania to feature in SPOTW has been tearing through the region of this split, alongside his teammates Jonathan “Express” Slade and Daniel “Torsos” Parsons. This week, the trio dropped only one series out of fourteen - a 1-3 loss to Mindfreak. The Australian sent an outrageous 3.25 shots towards net each game in the playoffs, over a quarter of which beat all members of the opposition (Amphis had the second highest goals per game at 0.94, especially impressive given he played 16 games that day).
4. Nick “mist” Costello - Team Envy
Yes, you read that correctly, Turbopolsa isn’t the Team Envy player in my ranking this time. Team Envy had just come off the back of losing four out of the last five games heading into the bracket reset and desperately needed someone or something to bail them out. The machine that is mist had almost 5 shots per game in that second series and scored over 35% of them. Over such a short time frame, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to call this a fluke, but mist had been performing at roughly that level all event long - third on goals per game at 1.23 and second on shots at 3.87 is a commendable effort for the 17-year-old.
3. Guilherme “Droppz” Siqueira - Chromax
The only repeat appearance this week is Chromax’s man up front Droppz. Although he wasn’t able to recreate the run that brought his team to the Winter Phase 1 Prime Series 2 victory, he was still one of the top players at the event, perhaps the best all-round with top five and top ten finishes in shots (3.2) and goals (0.9) per game out of players who reached the playoffs. Droppz was definitely no slouch in the midfield either, averaging an assist once every two games or so.
2. Joseph Jamie “hibbs” Hibbert - Team Singularity
What do Dignitas, Endpoint, Galaxy Racer, and Vodafone Giants have in common? As it turns out more than just being teams with automatic spots at Winter Regionals. They all got beaten by Team Singularity in a surprising run to the crown in The Grid Week 2. All hail hibbs though, for he was the one that finished the job against the Giants. The Brit scored seven of Singularity’s nine goals in the five game series, that’s a success rate of 35% exactly since he took twenty shots. Singularity were tested on defence though, especially in game two’s seven-minute overtime, Hibbs blocked thirteen shots over the course of the series.
1. Caden “Sypical” Pellegrin - Spacestation Gaming
The lower bracket run is a scary one, and Spacestation’s started in round one after an embarrassing loss to Alpine Esports. The former undisputed number one team in North America ground out eight consecutive victories, but fell to Team Envy in the grand final bracket reset, and Sypical was making plays throughout.
Averaging three shots per game is no cause for congratulations, but the tenacity and consistent delivery of those shots from Sypical, alongside his two saves per game over the course of the competition was more than enough to secure his spot as my final Standout Player of the Week in 2020.
There is more Rocket League action before Christmas, in the second edition of the Rocket League Summit which has separate competitions in Europe and North America (where you can see even more of Sypical). In the meantime though, stay tuned for more news, interviews and features here at GGRecon.
Header image via Psyonix