Swiffer: “Unwarranted amount of vitriol” around SK’s bot changes

LoL Esports

June 12, 2024

Lee Jones

SK Gaming has begun the 2024 LEC Summer split with a bang, capping out an unbeaten opening weekend by beating GIANTX. We spoke to head coach Simon “Swiffer” Papamarkos to get his thoughts on the start, discussing how they can keep the momentum going and addressing community concerts with their newly imported bot lane.

Esports.net: How pleased are you with the 3-0 start?

Swiffer: I think that obviously really, really pleased. Although I’m hyper-aware of the SK week one meme stuff. So I’m not gonna get too excited.

Lee Jones: Is it even more satisfying to hit the ground running after making roster moves, rather than needing time to gel?

Swiffer: To be honest, the fact that bot lane doesn’t have the best communication right now has actually made it so that our topside are really, really concise with their plan-making and understand that there is a lot of responsibility on them to shape the game. I feel like it’s made the team a lot more cohesive in a weird way.

Lee Jones: There was a lot of backlash as soon as the signings of Rahel and Luon, formerly HH, were leaked.

What did you make of that?

Swiffer: I understand the sentiment, but I think, first of all, an unwarranted amount of vitriol. Secondly, a lot of the people writing just actually… I know that they have very limited understanding of what happens behind the scenes. So there’s no point getting angry about that.

I just wish, I don’t know, people were more reasonable about trying to understand why it’s happening the way that it’s happening or like the processes that are involved or something. It’s not like we just opened up like Games of Legends and just looked for someone that had the Korean flag next to their name and just went: “Yep, that looks good to us”.

Image credit: Riot Games

How did you come to sign those two in particular?

Swiffer: We watched an extensive amount of Challengers. And then, to be honest, it started from the decision to look for somebody else for our bot lane. And we originally only wanted to do one part of the bot lane swap and we were mainly looking at support and we wanted someone that we felt like would actually mesh really well with our then ADC Exakick.

Then when we found what we found was a really good player, we realized that the English wasn’t fantastic because we were looking at swapping half of the bot lane out. We’d also been looking at ADCs and Rahel for us was basically at the top of the list amongst a few European prospects actually, that didn’t work out for whatever reason. And so then it kind of became, well, they both really wanted to play with each other and we felt like both of our players had problems in their own respects, and so we felt like the change was quite justified in that way.

Has there been an effort to help them settle?

Swiffer: I think the agent is really good; constantly available on call, instant English lessons. And the woman who takes them for those lessons kind of is a bit more of like a — I hesitate to say a maternal figure — but takes care of them. She’s also checking in on them and their well-being and everything.

They get along with each other really well and have been completely unproblematic with every respect. And then the three players that we have have really gone above and beyond to kind of be inclusive and make sure that they’re feeling the vibe and feeling welcome.

Lee Jones: Luon has name-swapped as his previous handle was obviously problematic for a move to Europe.

Was that agreed as part of his signing?

Swiffer: Yeah, it was actually really funny. I think it was my brother, when I was talking to him about it, he said, like:

“It’s a bit of a weird name to have, isn’t it?”, and I’m like: “Oh, s***, I didn’t even think of that”.

And then we kind of started asking around and we realized they wouldn’t be appropriate. So before he got signed to the database, I think, we had already agreed that the name would have to be swapped.

Lee Jones: It feels like SK has often had good splits in recent years, but they seem to always be followed by forgettable ones.

Do you think this is the time that the good form sticks?

We’ve obviously tried to retroactively look at why that’s the case. We put it down to trying to just cram too much into the week, into the split, and from a coaching perspective just making it over-complicated and trying to change things too much from what we actually identified as our strengths.

Having said that, when you have success you feel like you can kind of branch out into every direction. And I think if you don’t have a very clear focus about where you’re going as a team, then it’s really easy to look around and see a bunch of different directions that you can go. But I think that’s where we’ve hopefully improved a lot as a leadership group in steering that direction.

Read next: LEC Summer 2024 - Schedule, Results & Info