With the 2019 NCAA Tournament kicking off on Thursday you’d probably think there isn’t any other sporting event of great significance going on, and you’d be absolutely correct.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a significant esports event happening, though.
Starting Thursday night, the 2019 Overwatch League season’s Stage 1 playoffs will kick off.
For those confused what “Stage 1 playoffs” means, the OWL season is essentially broken up into four five-week stages with a playoff at the end of each one with the exception of Stage 4, which will have the actual playoffs played at that stage’s conclusion.
The top eight teams from each of the first three stages qualify for the respective stage finals, where those teams have a chance to make a little extra prize money as each stage final has $500,000 in total prize money up for grabs, with the winning team walking away with $200,000 of that.
This is important to understand, because in both of their inaugural seasons, the two Canadian OWL clubs, the Vancouver Titans and Toronto Defiant, managed to reach the 2019 Stage 1 playoffs as the No. 1 and 3 seeds, respectively.
It’s an impressive feat, especially for a pair of expansion teams with rosters that featured little to no OWL experience prior to this season.
Vancouver will open its Stage 1 playoffs Thursday night at about 8:00 p.m. PT against the No. 8 seed Boston Uprising, while Toronto will take on the San Francisco Shock on Friday at approximately 11:00 p.m. ET. Both matches can be found on the OWL’s Twitch page.
Here’s a little more on how both the Titans and Defiant have managed to get out to strong starts they’ve enjoyed and how they’re feeling heading into the Stage 1 playoffs.
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Vancouver Titans
The Titans are the best team in the OWL this season, sporting not only a perfect 7-0 record, but also a league-best plus-18 map win-loss rating, having taken a whopping 24 maps so far this season against just six losses and no ties.
This hot start shouldn’t be much of a surprise, however, as nearly the entire Titans roster this season was the super successful RunAway roster that won the second season of Overwatch Contenders Korea – probably the second best Overwatch league to the OWL in the world – last year.
“We expected to be a strong team coming in even though we didn’t have the Overwatch League experience,” said Titans assistant coach Harsha Bandi over the phone. “But we have a really strong team in terms of talent, so we expected to do very well just based off of that.”
Strong not only in terms of ability, because this Titans team has now been together for nearly two years, they have an advantage that most other teams don’t: Chemistry.
“When I talk to people on other teams they emphasize how much they have to work on communication, whereas, on this team, [that’s something] that’s taken for granted for us because I think there’s an innate nature between these players where they’re able to do things without needing to communicate it,” said Bandi.
“We’re all living in the same house now and it’s still a family environment like it was in Korea, so it’s something that’s just such an asset for our team where they’re so comfortable with each other and they know each other inside the game and outside the game, whereas a lot of other teams are just getting to know each other.”
On the surface, the fruits of this teamwork the Titans have forged with each other can be seen in their perfect start to the season, but when looking at the games themselves, it’s evident that Vancouver’s strong play has come not only from its excellent co-ordination, but in its mastery of the Overwatch League’s current meta game.
The meta game, put simply, is the game within the game where players and coaches try to find, based on the current rules of the game, what is the most optimal way to win. This is something seen in traditional sports as well such as in hockey, where the current meta of the NHL can be seen as dominant speed and skill as opposed to physicality and heaviness as it once was.
Looking at Overwatch now, the meta is something called GOATS. This is a team composition that features three tank and three support characters and is named so because the first team to play this lineup was named GOATS.
This triple tank, triple support composition has proven to be not only among the strongest in Overwatch League play, but also probably the most stable. As such, it’s become the most prominent lineup featured in the league dating back to last season and the Titans just might be the very best at doing it.
“I don’t think anybody really expected us to go 7-0 off the top,” Bandi said. “Most of us expected to be more like 5-2 or 6-1 – at least dropping a match somewhere – so we’ve definitely performed better than expected but, reflecting on it, we think we’re one of the strongest teams in terms of what the meta game is.”
GOATS is a composition that relies heavily on strong teamwork and communication, and seeing as that’s a definite strength of the Titans it makes sense they’ve excelled so quickly.
Next up is the Stage 1 playoffs where, for the first time ever, the team will be faced with some pressure as the No. 1 seed. With that said, it looks like Vancouver is looking forward to the challenge.
“One of the things that I’ve come to really appreciate about this team is that when matches start they flip to another gear and are incredibly focused,” said Bandi. “I think it’s just the resilience they show week in and week out that’s made me really proud.”
Toronto Defiant
At 5-2, the Defiant have been approximately as successful as their west coast Canadian counterparts but have done so in a much different way.
While the Titans have made great use of a strong, existing roster, the Defiant found early triumph by going in the opposite direction and specially building their team from the ground up.
“Our approach coming into the season was that we went for a statistical ‘Moneyball’ approach compared to a lot of other teams,” Defiant general manager Jaesun Won said over Discord.
So just like Billy Beane first did with the Oakland Athletics all those years ago, Won and the Defiant decided to look beyond past results and opted to dig into hard data to create the successful roster we see today.
“We had had Dennis ‘Barroi’ Matz, our analyst who is also the founder of Winston’s Lab, and what he did is he took a deep dive into trying to find the best Tier 2 players from Korean Contenders, and he went to find the best performers, basically, in terms of how they performed during the Contenders season.
“After that, we basically trialled them and went to see which players would actually fit with each other. Because not only do you want to find the ones that statistically did well, after we would start trialling them we would want to find out the ones who had synergy with each other.”
The results have spoken for themselves, particularly over Toronto’s last three matches that’s seen it drop just two maps in that span, including a clean sweep in its last match against the Hangzhou Spark.
Because of the way Toronto constructed its roster, many prognosticators believed the Defiant were destined to be among the weaker teams in the league this season as the roster was made up of players who weren’t well known. Number don’t lie, though, and now they have an opportunity to really make some noise in the playoffs, but this time, people will see them coming.
“I think the teams definitely do understand that,” said Won in regards to people now recognizing how good the Defiant actually. “I think a lot of more seasoned analysts do understand that, also. Because, obviously, they can’t deny what they’ve effectively seen.”