Can anyone ‚MVP Phoenix‘ their way through group B of the Shanghai Major today? No. Both Fnatic and Team Spirit should be way too weak to seriously challenge the powerhouses Alliance and Vici Gaming. Should…
After [mvp phoenix] surprised everyone yesterday by winning group A of the Shanghai Major flawlessly against [team secret] and [ehome], everyone’s taking a close look at group b today. Can [fnatic] or [team spirit] pull off a korean stunt and beat the powerhouses [alliance] and [vici gaming]. Well, you should never say never, but here are some reasons why it it highly unlikely.
1. The World Ranking
[vici gaming] is currently the fifth most successful team in the Dota 2 Team World Ranking, which counts all results of the past twelve months. [alliance] is eigth. There is a huge gap to [fnatic], who is 21. right now and [team spirit] on rank 65. You think that’s unfair, because both Fnatic and Spirit don’t exist for twelve months in their current lineup. Fair enough, let’s move on.
2. The Trend
So let’s just look at the past three months and basically all tournaments between the Frankfurt Major and the Shanghai Major. In this ranking Alliance is the third best team in the world, Vici is on rank 8. Then there’s – you guessed it – a huge gap to Fnatic on rank 20 and Team Spirit on rank 29. Though to be fair the latter both score better in this ranking than MVP Phoenix did. But Alliance won the World Cyber Arena and Star Ladder Star Series in the meantime and Vici Gaming didn’t finish any tournament worse than a fifth place.
3. The Lineups
Both Fnatic and Team Spirit signed brilliant players – for a southeastasian team and one from the CIS-region. As you can see in the infographic above, the average score of each player in the Dota 2 Player World Ranking is much lower than for Alliance and Vici Gaming. The latter are three times stronger – on average. Alliance has the same players that won The International 2013, Vici Gamings players won ESL One New York back in 2014 together.
4. The Community
Does anyone believe in Fnatic and Team Spirit at all? Well yes, some do. 24 percent of the people in our survey named Fnatic as a possible Majors-champion, 23 percent voted for Team Spirit. Thats the 13. and 14. best score – only [complexity gaming] and [team archon] score lower. On the other hand, [alliance] is the second most likely champion for the community (71 percent voted for them) and Vici Gaming the sixth most likely with 42 percent.