After defeating Cloud 9 in the 2016 NA LCS Grand Finals which took place in a sold out Air Canada Center in Toronto, Canada, TSM AD carry Doublelift shared some interesting details about his team’s practice relationship with fellow NA team Immortals.
In the post-game conference Doublelift was asked who he wants to win the Gauntlet; the regional qualifiers that determine who will join TSM to represent North America at Worlds. In true Doublelift fashion, his response would spark headlines and create a buzz on social media immediately:
“Um… Well, now that this is over, I can say that I really hope Immortals loses because they really, really, wanted us to lose, and they wouldn’t scrim us. So, we had a pretty low practice coming into the finals, which was really…. I mean like, it does make sense. Like they want us to lose because they didn’t want to face C9 in the gauntlet.
I still thought that was a pretty scummy thing to do which was just to intentionally blockade us from scrimming. So I really hope they lose, and I also think Cloud 9 are pretty good so they should be able to beat Immortals again. So, yeah, I reckon that the three top teams from NA is going to be us, CLG, and Cloud 9.”
Immortals’ CEO Noah Winston responded shortly after by releasing this confused tweet:
@NaserAlNaqi @LoyotatheDragon @TimSevenhuysen @Ryantang20 We scrimmed them Thursday..?
— Noah Whinston (@NWhinston) August 29, 2016
A few days later, presumably just enough time to censor all of the cursing, Travis Gafford of Yahoo Esports released an interview with Doublelift which took place at 1AM, hours after TSM defeated Cloud 9.
Doublelift explains that while Immortals didn’t straight up reject TSM’s requests to scrim, they gave plenty of weak excuses, including turning down a scrim block because their players were tired, only to scrim C9 later that same night.
Doublelift went on to admit it’s in Immortals’ rights to deny TSM scrims if it is in their best interest to do so, but then it’s also fair game for him to be upset and call them out on the indirect way they did it.
To close out the topic, Doublelift ended with “I really hope Cloud 9 shits on Immortals”.