Dignitas Roster Swap – Analysis of stats behind the acquisition of Shiphtur and Zion

With the craziest off-season in LCS history, teams have been making huge moves in order to try and bulk their team up for the Season 4 World's Championship. One of the first big moves was by Dignitas, who acquired both Zionspartan and Shiphtur from the relegated team Coast, to replace their top and mid laners CruzertheBruzer and Scarra. Here I want to take a look at this roster move from a stats point of view to see how big this move was for Dignitas. First up mid lane, with the switch from Scarra to Shiphtur:

Shiphtur was known for the later half of last split as the guy "stuck in elo hell." His stats are clearly impressive, especially given that he was on a losing team and losing teams get 5x worse KDA. However, Shiphtur managed to stay above-average in most basic stat categories, and it gets really interesting when we begin to introduce advanced stats. Even though Scarra played 6 fewer games this season (when Goldenglue came in), Shiphtur had significantly higher stats in all categories excluding deaths. The biggest takeaway from these stats is that Shiphtur played a bigger role on Coast than Scarra has on Dig, Shiphtur got a bigger percentage of gold, a bigger percentage of kills, and got fed way more buffs. This shows with the champions picked as well, Scarra played more traditional mages such as Ori, Gragas, and Karthus; while Shiphtur favored either poke mages or assassins, champions better able to make plays. This change should introduce a shift in playstyle, as they will be adding a resource-hungry playmaker to the slot often occupied by a teamfight-oriented player, although this could be good for the team, as it may give some relief to QTpie, who had been the biggest "carry" in the last split of the LCS.

The teams other change was in the top lane, switching out CruzertheBruzer for CST's Zionspartan. Zion has been long regarded as one of the stronger members of Coast, however the stats have not always been there to back that assertion up. He has one of the lowest KDAs and a below average GPM. However, after digging more in depth we have begun to reveal why this player has garnered so much hype, as he has the 2nd most solo kills, behind Bjergsen, with very few solo-deaths. This is representative of his high presence on the map, and his affinity for split pushing. Cruzer however has not been known for his split pushing, focusing on tanky teamfight style champions like Mundo, Trundle, and Shyvana while Zion has played a significant number of games on champs like Jax, Lee Sin, Yasuo, and Nasus. We end up seeing the same situation here as we saw above with Shiphtur vs Scarra, where Zion is well above-average in resources gotten, he has the most buffs out of all top laners, he has the highest % of his team's gold out of any top laner, and he has the highest % of his team's kills out of any top laner (barely beating out Innox of EG). Zion is clearly prefers to be more of a solo-playmaker than Cruzer did, so it will be interesting to see how Dignitas adapts.

Dignitas Team Dynamic

The big question posed by these stats is how the team dynamic of Dignitas is going to change. Previously they were a team focused on their botlane and jungle, with QT posting huge numbers last split, while their solos generally got less gold, less farm, and less buffs. Was this because their solo's were underperforming, or it was Dig's strategy to intentionally feed resources into the bot lane and jungle, giving him things like free side lane farm. While a lot of other analysts are concerned that this hasn't changed their shotcalling problems, this balancing of resources is going to be more trouble than I think they expected, with 4 "star" resource hogs in Crumbzz, Zion, Shiph, and QT, someone is going to have to give up some farm and it will be interesting where we see the dips. Similarly the pressure of the playmaking Zion and Shiphtur might take some pressure off of bot lane and improve their team dynamic drastically, raw talent isnt always bad.

Data collected with help by the onGamers Stats team: Jesse 'JALbert' Albert, Derek 'Kathix' Adams, Steven 'whedgehead' Falgout, Kent 'Traepoint' Frasure, Jake Morales, and James 'PelkaSupaFresh' Pelkey. Design by Ben 'Sarcasmappreciated' Li.