T1 have finally lost their first regular season match of the 2022 season. The League of Legends team fell to Kwangdong Freecs earlier today 2-1, marking their first regular season defeat on the LCK stage this year.
T1 had dropped individual games in the regular season coming into today but hadn’t lost two games in the same match during the domestic portion of their schedule. Before today, the only series that T1 had lost in 2022 came at the hands of Royal Never Give Up during the grand final of the Mid-Season Invitational.
T1 won 26 straight matches to open the season before finally losing a best-of-one match in the rumble stage of MSI to G2 Esports. Before today, T1’s record in LCK matches was a spotless 24-0 on the year.
Today’s match against Kwangdong saw T1 jump out to an early 1-0 lead following a clinical 27-minute victory. But Kwangdong rebounded with a lopsided game two victory before following it up with a hard-fought 38-minute win to close the book on T1. In game three, Kwangdong threw a series of curveballs at T1 during the draft, including a mid lane Ornn for Fate and Ashe for AD carry Teddy. Neither champion had been picked at those respective positions in the LCK since 2021 before today.
Over the final two games of today’s series, Kwangdong outpaced T1 in the kill department by a margin of 31-12. Out of those 31 total kills, Teddy participated in 28 of them, earning his 1,800th career LCK kill in the process. He sits fourth on the all-time LCK kill leaderboard.
For the first time this season, T1 are looking up the LCK standings. Undefeated Gen.G sit just above T1 on the leaderboard midway through the third week of play in the Summer Split. T1 are tied alongside DRX for second place in the league. Both teams have records of 4-1, but that tie will be broken when they face off on Friday, July 1. As for Kwangdong, they’ll get the chance to beat another undefeated squad later this week when they square off against Gen.G on Saturday, July 2.
