It’s getting ugly for T1’s League of Legends squad.
The team lost their fourth consecutive match today, this time to the even worse-struggling DRX. The loss is the team’s sixth out of seven matches dating back to July 2—the date that star mid laner Faker went down with an arm injury.
Faker (who, to no one’s surprise, is actually really important to T1’s chances of winning) has missed seven straight matches but was originally only supposed to miss four. The team intended for him to make his return on July 21 against Hanwha Life Esports but instead pushed his comeback to the start of the playoffs on Aug. 8. The most glaring issue, though, is that T1’s playoff spot isn’t guaranteed, and if the team continues to lose, they could miss the playoffs altogether, putting Faker’s return in deep jeopardy.
Late-season woes have T1’s postseason dreams on the fritz
After today’s loss to DRX, T1 hold a negative record of 7-8 in the 2023 LCK Summer Split. For reference, their record when Faker went down was 6-2. Now, T1 have a losing record 15 matches into the split and are in danger of missing the LCK playoffs. The team has not had a losing record this late into a season since 2018, when they finished seventh in the LCK with a record of 8-10 and missed the World Championship for just the second time in franchise history.
T1 have only missed Worlds three times (2014, 2018, and 2020), but should they fail to make the Summer Playoffs, they could add another season to that total.
The team built itself a respectable cushion early in the split, though, winning six of their first eight matches in the summer. That cushion has been strong enough to withstand an immediate 1-6 slide but could start to crumble should T1 lose all three of their final matches. Furthermore, the pre-Faker-injury T1 also secured 70 Championship Points by qualifying for MSI as Korea’s second seed back in the spring. Should T1 miss out on the playoffs, there’s still a decent chance that those 70 Championship Points will be enough to put them into the back end of the bracket for the LCK Regional Finals, otherwise known as the end-of-season “gauntlet” that gives teams a last chance to qualify for Worlds.
T1’s road to the playoffs is still easy, though
For T1 to fall out of the playoff race, they’d have to lose all of their remaining matches, while multiple teams below them in the standings all go on winning streaks. With four teams currently sitting with records of 4-11, they’d have to meet T1 in the middle and finish alongside them at 7-11, then they’d probably have to win a tiebreaker game as well.
For T1, the road to the playoffs is so much easier: just win one.
One series victory would be enough for T1 to clinch a spot in the playoffs and keep their season afloat as no other team that’s currently out of the playoff picture could reach them at eight wins. Still, it would be possible for T1 to sneak into the postseason with a record of 7-11, considering just how far behind the curve the rest of the LCK is. Losing the remainder of their scheduled games and then winning a tiebreaker could be a feasible scenario for T1, provided they end up tied with the right team. If they end up tied with DRX at the end of the split, for example, they’d be washed out since DRX beat T1 twice over the span of the last four weeks, gaining control of their head-to-head in case of a tie.
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T1’s final three matches of the Summer Split will come against KT Rolster, Kwangdong Freecs, and Liiv SANDBOX. The first of those teams is the best in Korea and the hottest in all of professional LoL: KT sit with a record of 14-1 and are in the midst of a 13-match winning streak. The other two, however, are definitely beatable, both sitting in the soup of teams with 4-11 records. All T1 have to do to secure their spot in the postseason bracket is win one of those two matches and they’re in.
Getting Faker back on the stage could be a different challenge altogether, though. Even though T1 are certainly a better team with the 11-year veteran in the lineup, his return isn’t completely safe from yet another potential delay.
No updates on Faker’s status have been given since his comeback was pushed back on July 21. T1’s next match against KT Rolster is scheduled for Saturday, July 29 at 1am CT.
