The community and I ranked GES pretty highly, with the community putting them 3rd and myself putting them at 5th.
Meanwhile LBT was given a pretty low ranking by the community at 8th, which could just be due to the fact that half the league hates LBT. I ranked this B-Team 3rd, so in my book this would be a good matchup.
Did it live up to the hype though? Let's find out!
First off, I feel really bad for LBT in G3H2, because while GES did get double the pups in that half (12-6), GES also got six tagpros, while LBT got a whopping zero. That's pretty bad luck for LBT and very good luck for GES, who had only gotten like 10 TPs in the last five halves combined. What's worse is that those six tagpros probably helped GES win that second half and win G3. But alas, what can you do.
For offense, you can see that steeze and noice were the best offenders for their respective teams, with steeze getting four caps and 312 hold, while noice had 458 hold and five caps. theslightest did pretty well alongside Noice, with four caps and 369 hold of his own. For LBT, their next best offender was hippo, with two caps and 355 hold. You can see from Table A below that the hold and cap numbers for both teams were pretty similar, separated by only eight seconds and one cap, so it makes sense to say that the offenses were of a similar quality.
For defense, you got LBT taking the top three spots, with GreatBambino, gh0st, and Psychic creating a potent defensive trio. gh0st stands out here with 509 prevent and 54 returns, while Psychic and Bambino seemed to do well in the prevent department, but kind of lag in the return area. WheelinTimmy was GES's best defender with 699 prevent and 44 returns. hellyea followed with 640 prevent and PenFifteen had 514 prevent. GES's defense was definitely more prevent-heavy compared to LBT, which is the opposite of their A-Team matchup. You could say that both defenses excelled in certain areas, which made them pretty similar in talent. Overall, a very even matchup.
Table A doesn't really show that many disparities, but they still warrant mentioning. LBT had 17 more tags than GES, and 22 more returns than GES, but GES had 150 more seconds of prevent and 17 more pops. LBT also averaged almost a second more hold per each grab compared to GES, and with both of these teams having a relatively low F/G ratio, this seems like an entertaining match. The pups were exactly the same, but we know that GES had those six TPs in G3H2 that probably granted them the win. Both teams had a low Score% in comparison to the league, but that's a testament to the strength of their respective defenses.
Looking at Table B, you can see that the biggest difference comes in terms of their Spark%. Now, Spark% refers to the percentage of captures that resulted from self-produced grabs, so no handoffs or regrab. LBT had a 73.96% spark rate, which meant that almost 3/4 of their caps came from self-produced grabs. But for GES, they had the second-lowest Spark% this week at 35%, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. This could just mean that they utilized handoffs and regrab more, and looking at GEH's 51 good handoffs, that makes sense. But another weakness for GES this week seemed to be Chain%, which is the percentage of handoffs that are actually good handoffs. GES had a 54% Chain%, which is the third-least this week out of all the B-Teams, so the offense has some issues to maybe work out. GSE utilized their pups way better than LBT from the looks of it.
CONCLUSION
This was the best B-Team game to watch this week if you wanted comebacks, close games, and clutch plays. LBT was pretty close to winning two games and the series, until GES took it from right under their noses. The LBT defense was more return-based, while the GES defense was more prevent-based. Meanwhile, the GES offense got their caps in, but a very low Chain% raises some questions on how well they're actually working together. You can't always grab a combined 238 times against a team. For LBT, focus on pup utilization. Fun games, hope to see them both in the playoffs.
