It is only natural for us, as humans, to look for a source of conflict whenever something is not working as it should. As this trend manifests season after season of LCS, Paul "sOAZ" Boyer has seen himself outstandingly targeted by criticism from the community.

I must admit, it’s not without cause. Infamously, he only performs at his highest capacity when stakes are high enough. This phenomenon, often referred to as “playoffs buff”, has never kept the community from directing regular season woes at him. There are several reasons that explain this consistent focus on him.

For starters, the LCS format trades off the excitement and tension of tournament play for a consistent stream of games. While the losses and benefits of this choice are far too lengthy to concern this piece, it is undeniable that it has a serious effect on the amount of games we get to experience him at peak form.

This problem has been pointed out by several players. A league greatly diminishes the value of certain gameplay choices. Top competitors often express how it is hard to keep motivation high during a whole split, and how the constant patch changes makes bootcamping a lot less worthwhile.

When you tie a format that discourages tryharding until the end with a player like sOAZ, you are unavoidably going to get a poor regular season performance. Critics will often point out that “As a professional, it’s his job to consistently deliver”. This is untrue, and fundamentally ignores how the human psyche works.

A playoffs buff is very similar to the choking phenomenon on its core. In the same way that it is incredibly hard to overcome choking, due to the impossibility of recreating stage nerves on a training setting, a similar thing happens with drive. It is unreasonable to demand of a player being able to experiment paralyzing nerves at will in order to overcome his choking, yet we expect of sOAZ to recreate his ambition and derive drive from it when no tension is present.

The fundamental difference in our judgment of both these cases lies in our own lives. Most of us have experimented being mediocre at some ability, and the dip in performance that comes from the insecurity of performing it public. The same can’t be said from talent. Very few have the talent to perform at a high level when it counts and slack around when it doesn’t. Having not experimented this before makes it hard to empathize with, resulting in less compassion and more willingness to direct blame at the player.

There is also the fact that people that haven’t been around since the old Fnatic days have a misunderstanding of what made him so incredibly effective. He was indeed at the top of mechanics at the time, but that never was what pushed him above and beyond his competition. His genius has always been rooted on his creative gameplay and unique understanding of the game.

Thanks to his unique understanding of the toplane, sOAZ was always at the forefront of innovation. He brought Jayce top into the competitive scene, and was the second person to ever debut with Kha’zix (both happened in the same tournament, suggesting that he prepared the pick before ever seeing it played.).

Perhaps in his most famous example, he exposed how stupidly broken Nunu top was before anyone was playing it. He bested his rival, Mike "Wickd" Petersen, in a best-of-five competition to decide who would attend the Season 3 All Stars, pulling the pick on the final game, and leaving no option for his opponent to win the duel. Nunu later rose up to popularity and was so dominant in the top lane that he ended up being nerfed to the ground.

The growth of infrastructure, combined with the aforementioned discouragement of bootcamping, made preparing surprise picks harder and less profitable. In the LCS era, we don’t see that unique understanding coming into play as often, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t still there. It shows itself in a more concealed manner.

Very rarely, if ever, is a player both famous and infamous for a similar play. sOAZ is one of those cases. As known as he is for getting caught on sidelanes, it pales in comparison to his creative escapism. A modern Houdini, he can get out of the craziest situations and overextensions, leaving the opponent overcommitted and empty handed. He has showcased this ability against the highest levels of competition time and time again.

Finally, and perhaps the single biggest factor in the community’s negative perception of sOAZ, Season 6 has a good deal of blame to take. Origen’s constant struggles only seemed to be under control when Enrique "xPeke" Cedeno Martinez was playing midlane. This huge difference in performance is often credited to an overblown change in team atmosphere when Tristan "PowerOfEvil" Schrage was subbed out.

Although this is most likely a very influential factor, it is undeniable that sOAZ had very poor synergy with his teammates. As a player that almost always finds himself wanting to play a sidelane or looking for skirmishes, the passiveness of his other lanes only set him up for failure. In other words, the team lacked a clear direction to pull together towards.

Even when he was mostly looking to play control mages, the more aggressive style of xPeke — paired with being the boss — gave him much needed control to force pressure and push the passive players into action. Even if the always fantastic Jesper "Zven" Svenningsen would rather look for a safer chance to make a play, when the guy paying you tells you to go in, you go in.

In this manner, they were able to either create space for sOAZ or to better capitalize on the pressure he was putting on. Paired with years of synergy and the excellent skirmishing that the duo could always showcase, we can now see a much clearer picture on how xPeke altered the 2016 spring Origen.

All these problems played their part on the current split for Fnatic. Skirmishing and the pressure game are heavily influenced by team cohesion and understanding of the game. Because of problems with coaching staff and the jungler position, they have found themselves with two rookies and little direction for their players.

It has, almost indisputably, been the worst split in the history of the Fnatic organization.

Nevertheless, the latest results would have you thinking otherwise. With the pressure of missing playoffs for the first time in the organization history, aggressive drafts that look to play an open map, and again a midlaner that thrives on skirmishes, the roster is looking alive. And so is sOAZ. Heavy skirmishing and playoffs have awoken him once again.

Unfortunately, statistics fail miserably on measuring clutchness, where the performance in tense situations gets lost in averages. Still, with Fnatic having faced Misfits, G2 and Giants for their last three series of the split, we have a pretty representative section of the overall league. When you take into account that all series went to game 3, the sample size becomes decent enough that it makes sense to talk about these numbers.

With the highest participation on his whole team across nine games, sOAZ was, on average, part of 70% of the Fnatic kills per game*. He topped everyone, and did so consistently, having (or sharing) the top kill participation for his team in six of these games.

He did so even on the last game of the season. With playoffs on the line, do or die, and despite getting constantly camped, sOAZ still managed to get for himself the highest kill participation...

From the toplane. On an open map, high skirmish composition — It can’t be stressed enough how solid his performance was.

Casting away any possible tilt that getting camped on this extremely high pressure scenario would impose over most mortals, his play gave Fnatic the strong footing necessary to secure their much at risk seventh playoffs. If you don’t want to credit him with MVP of this last all-in game, you at least must admit that he was the backbone of their performance.

This is what you risk missing out on if you measure real-time sOAZ with the regular season scale. His original style and qualities enrich the league and should be celebrated, even if, as fans, we can’t help but get frustrated at performances during the split. Form is temporary, but sOAZ is permanent.

*  The data used to pull these numbers excludes any kills obtained just before killing the nexus, in order for the number to better illuminate skirmishing prowess and proactive play.

If you enjoyed this piece, follow the author on Twitter at @cabramaravilla. 

Photo Credits: As.com || LoLesports