As I rewatched parts of G1 and G2 of the grand finals, WBG doesn’t even seem to belong there. At no point of the series was T1 about to slip any games away. They held firm control of the map and every objectives and the finals is pretty much anticlimatic from the first minute of the first game to the last minute of the series.
JDG games were much closer at 50/50 and T1 was even down like 8k gold in one.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot too haha. Obviously the official finals was WGB vs T1 but it feels like JDG put up a bigger fight.
Part of this has to do with there being two child node paths towards the finals and which teams are on which side of the tree. It’s only split in two and if you have strong teams on the same side then you’re going to get a rather depressing final because the biggest fights will happen on the way to the finals instead of at the finals.
Another reason is that there seem to be some triangles in terms of team vs team. An example would be GenG > T1 > WGB > GenG. These triangles make it so whoever gets a better draw will move to the finals. Had T1 versed GenG on the way to finals and lost, only for GenG to then lose to WGB when we saw what T1 did to WGB it’s hard to say who’s the better team when it seems that some teams might just have weaknesses exploited better by other teams.
And the last point is one that has already been made in the comments about single elimination, that you get one chance in tournaments like this and that’s it. On game day it’s do or die. It was said a lot on stream that WGB are a very volatile and inconsistent team. A funny small example was when TheShy outplayed Oner’s nocturne dive only then to walk back into Zeus for an aa + Q and die.
The point is it’s hard to measure teams against each other. Some are consistently decent and some are less consistent but have higher min/max. These tournaments are a mix of luck of the draw and the skill you have to deal with what you’re placed against.
In this case T1 was able to do it best.