OPL Power Rankings: Split 1, Week Six

Howdy all, and welcome to Snowball Esports’ weekly OPL Power Rankings. These will be hot off the press each Monday, serving only the hottest takes fresh out of the oven that was the last week’s games. Our panel, as always, are our contributors: Reece, Andrew, Callum, Swifty, and former SIN Gaming coach Bencel.

A quick note on power rankings: Power Rankings are different to how one would traditionally rank teams. Normal rankings are a bit more based on ability than results. In a traditional ranking if one team beat another you could still rank them lower if you thought they were still worse than the team they beat. Power Rankings are by definition recency-biased and results-focused and are more of a snapshot of how a team looks right now than how they have looked throughout the year or how they project overall. A bad loss may see a team drop below a team most would see them as being better than. A string of losses can see a team tumble down the rankings.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Andrew Wray
Reece Perry
Callum Matthews
Swifty
Bencel

Want more detail as to why our panel put the teams in the order they did? Click below for more thoughts from each pundit.

Andrew Wray

DW / ORD / CHF / LGC / AV / SIN / BMR / TTC

Very difficult to split ORD/CHF after seeing a dominant Chiefs performance with a 50 minute series win.

AV and LGC are getting very difficult to split after AV getting the series win twice over LGC but Legacy taking a game off the Dire Wolves and turning in a very competitive series has piqued my interest for the gauntlet.

Bad luck for Tectonic that someone had to lose the series and as a result find themselves last.

Let Andrew know what you think of his power rankings on Twitter @AWray7

Reece Perry

DW / CHF / ORD / LGC / AV / SIN / BMR / TTC

The gap between ORDER and The Chiefs continues to narrow, but as long as they keep putting up similar results, the nature of those matches continues to not be substantially different enough to justify flipping them. I still give The Chiefs the edge on Strength of Schedule. Legacy and AV flip on the nature of their results. Legacy show stronger results on a consistent basis against like opposition, to a degree that for my money it overpowers the head-to-head. I called BMR over TTC in this column last week, and on the Friday Flash-Forward, and much like when I moved SIN to 6th the week before their victory over Bombers I am again proven right. *smug*

Let Reece know what you think of his power rankings on Twitter @LoLTies

Callum Matthews

DW / ORD / CHF / LGC / AV / SIN / BMR / TTC

Legacy, despite having lost to Avant twice in the split move ahead and take 4th place. Avant appear to be on the decline, after having a strong start to the split defined by the synergy in the top side of the map. Legacy appears to be on the rise, and should only improve with further improvement in their baron play.

The bottom three still appear quite close despite Bombers taking the 2-0 against Tectonic. The lack of proactivity between these teams had favoured Bombers. SIN moved ahead of both of these teams due to a seemingly favoured matchup against both these teams and being able to push early tempo.

Let Callum know what you think of his power rankings on Twitter @CDMLoL

Swifty

DW / ORD / CHF / LGC / AV / SIN / BMR / TTC

ORDER and Chiefs both with clean 4-0’s this week, Dire Wolves faltering a little against Legacy but still come out on top. I’ll be watching next Sunday’s games very closely. The only change for me on the bottom side is Bombers moving up 1 after their victory over Tectonic.

Let Swifty know what you think of his power rankings on Twitter @Swift_y

Bencel

DW / ORD / CHF / LGC / AV / SIN / BMR / TTC

Over the course of the super weeks I think the top 3 have distinguished themselves from AV. Thus putting us more into a 3-tier system; (DW, ORDER and Chiefs in 1-3, Legacy and AV 4-5 and Sin, Bombers & Tectonic 6-8).

Looking at playoffs, Legacy are more likely to have a chance against the teams in the top tier than AV however they need to overcome this weakness they seem to have vs AV. Bombers finally had a result against Tectonic in which their players just overpowered the Tectonic lineup. ORDER have displayed a lot of problems in what be clean 2-0’s but end up being far from it. Meanwhile Dire Wolves are clearly taking every opponent seriously and look the more solid roster. Chiefs are getting better every week and I think the likely match in the gauntlet vs ORDER will be the toughest one to call.

Let Bencel know what you think of his power rankings on Twitter @Bencel92