Image credit: LoL Esports Flickr, Michal Konkol/Riot Games
They’ve finally done it. After 1,142 days, UK-based organisation Excel Esports have finally made the promised land of the LEC playoffs, a dream they’ve been chasing since their entry into the LEC in 2019.
It’s especially special for Excel’s Dutch head coach Joey ‘YoungBuck’ Steltenpool, who has been with the team since late 2019. The six star general has finally brought them to playoffs and now they hope to achieve more. Megalodontus interviews YoungBuck for more insight into their historic playoffs moment.
Update (March 27th 2022): Excel ended up crashing out of the playoffs in the first round, however it was a close match versus Vitality. Excel narrowly lost 3-2, after being 2-1 up.
Thank you so much for joining us on ENUK, YoungBuck. I’m standing in for Dom today. So after seven tries for the org, how does it feel and what does it mean to you and the team for Excel to finally make playoffs?
YoungBuck: It feels a bit difficult to celebrate and more like a big weight off of our shoulders because we felt like we deserved it, but we kind of thought that yesterday was gonna be the day we locked it in. Yesterday we were just really stressed out like, “not again, not again”, everything going the wrong way. So it mainly felt like a really big burden off of our shoulders and I think it means a lot to Excel.
The thing is, we finished seventh sometimes where we deserved to be seventh or not make playoffs, but we’ve also finished seventh sometimes where we were a top-six side and we should have made playoffs. Now we are a top-six team that deserved to make playoffs – and we made playoffs. We set a new record for Excel internally, with nine wins in a regular season, and it’s just looking like [we’re on the] up and up, and we are looking to do some damage in playoffs.
What do you feel was different this time, compared to past seasons where you missed out on playoffs?
YoungBuck: I think the quality of the roster overall is just better than any roster we’ve had before. I think what has to be said with almost all of the rosters is that the personalities in the team click very well, there’s very little fighting or arguing. Almost everything has been dealt with maturely, so there’s never like any big problems happening for most of the last two and a half years in Excel.
This team is also very mature. When we have draft meetings, everyone is mostly aware of what they can and cannot play, and they’re looking for solutions together. Everyone is putting their heads together to work on the draft and how to get better, so it’s not like there’s one player that’s just on the outside.
It’s a good team atmosphere, a hard-working atmosphere. We know what we need to do, what we need to grind and the players are just really good.
Okay, so you’re telling me that Caedrel contributed nothing to it?
YoungBuck: Well… he didn’t contribute to us not making playoffs but he did contribute to putting Excel on the map!
“We are a top-six team that deserved to make playoffs. We set a new win record for Excel in a regular season, we’re on the up and now we’re looking to do some damage in playoffs.”
Fair enough! I don’t really want to delve into this topic too much, but I’d like to ask you about Excel replacing Advienne with Mikyx. How has the team progressed since then and what has Mikyx brought to the team that’s given you guys this push to be able to make playoffs?
YoungBuck: I think the biggest difference was… in our team, overall, we were missing someone that was willing to lay his life down for an engage, and Mikyx is that player that doesn’t mind engaging in those situations, so I felt like he could fill the role of first engage player if we didn’t get champions in other roles that were really easy to do it with.
That helped us a lot, and I feel like for his vision game, he probably has the best warding stats in the entire LEC. He definitely does in scrims compared to other teams, the map is almost always completely lit up and it’s very easy to play sidelanes because of how he wards.
I recall that Patrik said in his post-game interview with Laure that he was actually afraid SK could have very well made the miracle run. Were you personally nervous that SK could pull off the miracle run? They have Gilius after all!
YoungBuck: Yeah, 100%. I think my heart rate was above 180 the entire day! Throughout the day, there were two camps, the camp with everyone except me and Patrik, who were talking about going top four, how to do it and how to make it, and then there was Patrik and I saying: “Guys, we’ve been here before.”
When everything can go wrong for Excel to not make playoffs, they go wrong!
When SK beat Rogue yesterday, we were like: “Damn! No, not again…”
Because if you go into the week, you look at the schedule and your best chance of making the playoffs is Rogue taking out SK and you’re done. Our second best chance is us beating SK. But then when you see Rogue losing, you can’t help but think: “Oh no, it’s not happening is it?”
I think Patrik and I definitely shared a lot of nerves there because we are conditioned to see things go wrong when they can go wrong.
A side question then on this, for coaching there is usually the method where you constantly instil confidence and tell players they are the best and there’s the side you mentioned, where you’re very realistic about the situation. For yourself, which one do you lean more towards? Do you think it helps the players if you are more confident or if you are more realistic about a given situation?
YoungBuck: I prefer to give and instil confidence when I can and I think I tried to hide just how nervous and stressed out I was about today. I hope the players didn’t catch on. But generally, I prefer just giving the confidence in the end. Do I think that it matters a lot? I’d say it’s very player and team dependent. It’s not like they don’t know that if they lose to SK that the miracle run might happen, right? So they would impose a lot of pressure on themselves regardless of what the coach does because they’ve done the math.
Looking onwards to playoffs, what do you think of Excel’s chances there and which team do you want to face? Patrik said he wants to face Misfits Gaming.
YoungBuck: Yeah, I think I’d want to face Misfits too, primarily because I think they won most of the games abusing Jinx before anyone else caught on to just how broken it is, and some teams still haven’t caught on. I think they have six wins on this champion and they get the win gifted by G2 as well. I think Misfits, as a team, we would have a good chance of beating them in playoffs.
Playing Team Vitality could also be fun. I think Vitality and Misfits are very competitive with one another, so those are just really fun potential best-of-five series. After that, I would say it’s a little bit difficult because I think we’re doing fine against Rogue and Fnatic in scrims. But on stage, a team like Fnatic is very experienced and they are very difficult and scary opponents. G2 as well is really good in scrims and on stage, so that’s an opponent we may want to avoid for now [laughs].
You have history with both Fnatic and G2, don’t you want to meet them eventually?
YoungBuck: Eventually… how about the semi-finals and the finals?
Are you telling me here right now there’s hope for Excel fans to believe they will make it to MSI 2022?
YoungBuck: …Woah. Well, I think when you make playoffs, there’s always the chance and I think there’s a few teams that we have a good matchup against.
However, I do think we need to use the next two to three weeks to reinvent ourselves a little bit, because we’ve been leaning a little bit too much on scaling for late game, which is a very consistent way of winning against teams that are equal or worse than you. But now that we’re playing teams that are equal or better, we have to also find other ways to win games.
“I think we’re doing fine against Rogue and Fnatic in scrims. But on stage, a team like Fnatic is very experienced and they are very difficult and scary opponents. G2 as well is really good in scrims and on stage, so that’s an opponent we may want to avoid for now!”
Are you worried about struggling in the best of fives since this iteration of Excel is quite new and have not experienced LEC playoffs matches together?
YoungBuck: I think it shouldn’t be that big of a difference, in terms of how you handle a best of five, how you tried to adapt between games, how you tried to predict what enemies are going to do, or how they’re going to predict to winning games or losing games in terms of like drafting, etc. So I don’t expect it to be much different.
We’ve come to the end of the interview, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to say and shout out you’d like to give?
YoungBuck: Of course, big shoutout to the fans that have stuck with us for so long. Seeing us constantly finish seventh, season after season, has probably been very tough and even kind of scary, but I hope we made the fans very proud and that we can one day very soon hear their chants again.
The LEC 2022 spring playoffs begin on March 25th as Excel Esports take on Team Vitality on the 26th. You can watch the matches on the LEC Twitch channel.
Megalodontus is a miraculous survivor from the mass extinction and somehow learnt how to use his stubby fins to operate complicated mechanical equipment and drink tea. Worryingly for cryptozoologists, he’s been writing League of Legends articles too.
A self-taught writer who’s had the privilege to work with good editors who aren’t terrified of his pearly whites, Megalodontus is often seen writing either independently or for various websites such as this one. When not writing, he usually runs it down mid in real life and is fascinated with watching paint dry.
