Nuguri Wins 2019 Dade Award

The "Dade Award" is a community award given to a player who fails to live up the hype drummed up by broadcast or fans leading up the League of legends World Championships. It's not a flattering award. It was named after Bae "dade" Eo-jin, a former Korean mid laner who disappointed fans and casters alike with his performance at the season 3 World Championship. He underperformed, and his team failed to make it out of groups.

This years winner of the Dade award goes apparently goes to Damwon Gaming's top laner Jang "Nuguri" Ha-gwon. Damwon was been eliminated from the tournament by European's first seed G2 Esports in the quarter finals. Though Nuguri is not solely to blame for Damwon's defeat, most people expected more from him this tournament.

There was a lot of hype surrounding Damwon this year. They were a rookie team that some how managed to claw their way into the LCK and perform above expectations all year long. As a new team they lacked the consistency that many veteran teams had and hit extremely low-lows over the course of the season, but none the less they were an undeniably talented group of young players. Some analyst even pegged them as the best team in the tournament given that they were all performing up to snuff.

Damwon ran through play-ins, emerging undefeated and found themselves seeded into group D along with former world champions Invictus Gaming, LMS representatives ahq e-Sports Club and North America's first seed, Team Liquid. They dropped one game to TL, but would once again go undefeated for the rest of the group stage to take the first seed in their group. After group stage however, they'd face G2 Esports in the quarter finals and would go down in four games.

So, what happened? And why is this Nuguri's fault? Well for starters, the one game that Damwon dropped in the group stages to Team Liquid came off of a stellar performance from Team Liquid's top laner Jung "Impact" Eon-yeong. The game was even until Impact broke the game open by finding a solo kill onto Nuguri to start off a team fight that lead to the NA squad to take Baron and snowball the rest of the game. However, this was only one game and Damwon would plow through the rest of the group including Team Liquid when they faced each other again.

The entire tournament, a lot of people were excited to see Nuguri square off Kang "TheShy" Seung-lok, Invictus Gaming's top laner who is also famous for his Vladimir play. TheShy is quite possibly the most talented top laner in the tournament if not the world, and many analyst consistently compared the two. The problem with this is that this is not a fair comparison at all. TheShy is Invictus Gaming's win condition almost every game. The amount of resources they put into him is quite large, with a lot of the teams strategy revolving around getting him ahead or giving favorable match ups in draft. Nuguri on the other hand is a weak side top laner. Nuguri often receives little to no resources and somehow finds ways to perform well in spite of this through creative plays or rune choices such as his popularization of Kleptomancy on Vladimir. If we take this into consideration, did Nuguri really play below expectations? Not at all.

So if Nuguri doesn't deserve the Dade award, who does? I am reluctant to give an answer until the rest of the tournament is over. We still have semi finals and finals to get through before we can say for sure. A lot of games to be played, a lot of opportunity for disappointment. Even if I were force to choose it would be a tough ask. Not many players were as hyped as Nuguri this year. Despite this, I feel all of Damwon still performed well and I am excited to see them in the LCK next season.