Usually, the all-pro team reveals cause a lot of excitement across all regions. While the LCK's reveal of a KT-only all-pro team sparked a lot of discussion, their all-pro teams are nowhere near as bland as the ones the LEC just presented.
After a split ends, the LEC comes together to vote for the best players of the split. Eligible to vote are each team's player roster, each team's coaching staff, the LEC broadcasting partners – which are the regional LEC broadcasts – the LEC's on-air talent and the most important press representatives.
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Last summer, this vote already raised huge questions when four MAD Lions players made it to the all-pro team. After a disappointing spring split that saw them miss playoffs, they replaced rookie mid laner Steven 'Reeker' Chen with former Fnatic mid laner Yasin 'Nisqy' Dincer, who promptly went on to feature on the all-pro team alongside three of his teammates.
Questions were quick to emerge about the results bias of the vote, with many community members sarcastically asking how bad Reeker has to be that three of the five best players can not make it to playoffs with him on the team. A year later, results bias can be interpreted into the all-pro votes once again.
LEC All-Pro Teams Revealed – Only One Player Brings Variation Into The Top Three
The 2nd and 3rd All-Pro Teams! pic.twitter.com/iaQZPWn5se
— LEC (@LEC) August 10, 2023
The first all-pro team is literally only G2 Esports. After a dominant regular season that only saw them drop one game against MAD Lions, they went through the group stage without dropping a single game. While their first match against Excel Esports in the playoffs was a close 3-2, their rematch in the grand finals was as one-sided as it gets.
For another dominant 3-0, G2 are rewarded with five out of the five possible spots on the first all-pro team. However, Excel Esports are rewarded with good results as well. Top laner Andrei 'Odoamne' Pascu was voted into the second all-pro team, which is otherwise filled with only Fnatic players.
Fnatic top laner Óscar 'Oscarinin' Muñoz Jiménez finds himself in the third all-pro team, accompanied by three of Odoamne's teammates. The only player not on the top three teams is jungler Marcin 'Jankos' Jankowski, who has claimed fourth place in summer with Team Heretics.
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The 2nd and 3rd All-Pro Teams! pic.twitter.com/iaQZPWn5se
— LEC (@LEC) August 10, 2023
While Fnatic have gotten the benefit of the doubt over Excel for their stronger regular season, Excel made it clear that they deserve to be a top three team with their strong group stage and playoffs run. This sentiment is shared by the LEC core too, as confirmed by the all-pro votes. However, these teams had many more games to prove themselves than teams that did not make playoffs.
While Team Vitality and Astralis have been eliminated for a good reason, the field behind G2 has genuinely been close. Between second and eighth place, every team has brought good reasons to the table why their players should be featured in the all-pro team.
With their early eliminations in the summer split, many of them were not able to show their true potential. The all-pro vote might not just reflect a results bias – instead, it might also give an advantage to teams that played more recently. It is difficult to say whether there is a solution for this, as the current LEC format is quite harsh with eliminations.