NA LCS Solo Kills - Bjergsen, Zionspartan and Hai lead league in unassisted kills

This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

So far in league statistics we weigh kills evenly, whether it's looking at a player's total kills for the season or looking at calculated stats such as KDA Ratio. This can be misleading as the person who ends up with the kill doesn't always do most of the work. To try to break down kills and what they are worth, we took a look at just the solo kills, or kills with no assists. Here were the results of the people who got the most solo kills and those who were killed the most.

Out of this data a few things really stuck out. The first person obviously being Bjergsen. Throughout the split many people have talked about his pressure in lane and when they talk about why Bjergsen is good, it's often attributed to him getting solo kills, and this data really shows that. Even with the games he missed, while he was getting his visa fixed, he still came out on top in the solo kill category. This brings a lot of validation to the hyped "kills" stat, mentioned a lot in reference to Bjergsen. It is not just how many kills Bjergsen has gotten, but rather the way in which he has gotten those kills, which is just as impressive.

However, the second place Zionspartan is also way ahead of the third place Hai. I suspect this is because of his play on carry top lane split pushers like Yasuo, Jax, Irelia and Riven. Despite his champion trends, this is still an impressive number and gives a lot of validity to the hype around Zionspartan, despite his other numbers like KDA or GPM not being as impressive, it shows his ability as a playmaker.

The last person to spotlight is Hai, who is known as a great mid laner, as named by Bjergsen himself when coming to NA, but has shown up lackluster in other stats categories. He is still shown here as a playmaker for his team, netting the third most solo kills.

Next thing to look at, which I thought was interesting, was who was the one giving up these solo kills?

The two leaders in the deaths category are pobelter and mancloud. Pobelter's stats really suit the hype around him, he is a playmaker who can get kills (as seen in the kill table above, he had 11), but he is still rough around the edges and gives up a lot of kills as well. There is "potential" in pobelter, but right now there is still room for growth.

Another impressive thing shown in this death chart is Zionspartan. As we saw above, he was a leader in solo kills, but he at the same time almost never dies to one person, only having 2 "solo deaths" to his 28 solo kills. I think this brings more evidence of him as a playmaking top lane who definitely brings pressure to the lane.

Lastly, I want to look at a few more breakdowns of this data, looking at the role distribution and the value of a solo kill. Solo kill teams go on to win 67% of games, while mid and top dominate the kills.

Thanks to Jesse 'JALbert' Albert for the data collection. Design by Ben 'Sarcasmappreciated' Li