For the second straight season, the North American crown will be decided in the Great White North. After defeating Cloud9 in the eastern city of Toronto, Team SoloMid will look to repeat over the same club, this time out west in Vancouver, in the North American League Championship Series spring final. Six times these two teams will have met in the finals, and TSM, which has qualified for every final in LCS history, heads into the matchup of the two rivals with a 3-2 edge in their never-ending rally.
At the close of last season's finale in Toronto, Canadian-born C9 support Andy "Smoothie" Ta stood in front of his countrymen for a postmatch interview with a dejected look on his face after his team lost to TSM. Yet, with his country's flag wrapped around his shoulders and the sold-out crowd cheering him on, he declared: "It's been pretty awesome being on C9. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."
A season later, Smoothie, searching for redemption on his home stage for a second time, has transformed into the league's premiere support player. Once forgotten on the Team Liquid roster following a lackluster LCS debut, Smoothie's play has only gotten better with each season.
"To me, personally, I think I did pretty well this split," Smoothie said to ESPN following his team's final qualification with a 3-0 victory over 3-seed Phoenix1. "I could have been a lot better, probably. My goal this year is to get a trophy for myself."
His opposition in the support role for TSM will be Vincent "Biofrost" Wang, the Rookie of the Split from the 2016 summer season and a fellow Canadian. Biofrost, in a similar situation as Smoothie, broke out from the relative unknown last year, getting picked up by TSM before the summer split as a former minor league journeyman and evolving into one of the league's top supports in only his first season. Unlike Smoothie, though, Biofrost has been forced to adapt to a new bottom lane partner this split, going from one veteran in Yiliang "Doublelift" Peng to another, this time in the form of Jason "WildTurtle" Tran.
"Keep cheering for us, [Canada]. We're probably going to impress some people this [year]. We're going to be improving a lot," Smoothie said.
The other featured matchup on Sunday will come in the mid lane. There, the two brightest Danish mid laners in the world will battle for the LCS championship -- in Canada. While the European LCS final between G2 Esports and Unicorns of Love concludes in Hamburg, Germany, TSM's Soren "Bjergsen" Bjerg and C9's Nicolaj "Jensen" Jensen will wage war in North America.
Bjergsen, a three-time NA LCS MVP winner, has been considered a class above the rest of his mid opposition for years at this point. Whenever a challenger has risen in the eyes of the people, Bjergsen, the face of TSM, has struck them down.
For at least the first half of this season, C9's centerpiece Jensen was outdoing the three-time MVP Bjergsen and on the verge of possibly picking up his own individual honor. Unfortunately for Jensen, the second half wasn't nearly as smooth as the first, and it has only been during the last week of the regular season and the semifinal matchup against Phoenix1's Yoo "Ryu" Sang-ook when he has resembled the early-season MVP front-runner. Not to be outdone, Bjergsen was equally as impressive in his dispatching of longtime rival Hai "Hai" Lam and FlyQuest, with both series ending in quick 3-0 sweeps.
Sunday will be Jensen's opportunity to finally to get the upper hand in the budding competition between the two Danes. It's only truly a rivalry when both sides take a marquee win against the other, and Vancouver might very well be the setting where Jensen notifies Bjergsen he finally has a worthy rival in the mid lane.