After spending two years with SK Gaming, talented European AD carry Crownshot will be exploring his options for another League of Legends team in 2021.
The 22-year-old marksman revealed that although he is still contracted with SK until this November, the organization has allowed him to look for a new opportunity. Crownshot said that he would be considering teams based in the LEC or LCS next year.
This past year was pretty disappointing for SK Gaming. In the 2020 Spring Split, the team failed to find any synergy as a group and finished in ninth place with an abysmal 4-14 record. The following season, the team switched out Jenax from the mid lane to the top lane in an attempt to find more success.
Luckily for fans, they were able to reach the playoffs with a 9-9 record but matched up against a red-hot Schalke 04. Schalke was in the middle of their fabled Cinderella run to the LEC playoffs, going from last place to sixth in the span of three weeks.
After getting swept by Schalke in the first round of the lower bracket, SK is now forced to regroup for the 2021 season. Crownshot has been a pretty big part of the team’s identity over these past two years, and his departure will leave a pretty big hole in the roster.
The ADC had the seventh-most kills in the LEC last split, according to Oracle’s Elixir. He also had great early game laning and damage stats, but this is also because SK Gaming played around him and gave him plenty of resources to work with.
SK went through significant changes in offseason going into Spring Split 2020. The first addition is jungler Kim “Trick” Gang-yun, a four-time EU LCS champion who joins SK following a short stint on Schalke 04. Dino “Limit” Tot, formerly of Ad Hoc Gaming, has been added to SK in the support position.
“We are very happy that we put together a team with huge potential,” said SK’s general manager, Rene Spanier. “We wanted to find the right balance between experience and talent to build a team around Jenax, Sacre and Crownshot which reaches playoffs and tries their hardest to surprise our fans.”
However, that didn’t come into fruition and the team has failed to achieve anything meaningful for the past year. With Crownshot being the best performing player, it makes sense for him to look for other opportunities as well if he wants to be on a competitor team.