Los Angeles Valiant vs New York Excelsior

For our second match of the day we have a very interesting match up between the New York Excelsior and the Los Angeles Valiant. For New York, this isn't a match of incredible importance - they're going to the playoffs for sure, but they want to clinch on to that number one spot and await for their rival in the finals.

For Los Angeles however, this is nothing more than redemption. They've had a couple of very good games and some abysmal ones as well over the course of the last few weeks. They've tried their Soon + Kariv DPS duo and it worked to a moderate success however they've also started playing with Agilities a bit more which hasn't really panned out as well as they had hoped. They're ranked seven right now and they have absolutely zero chance of reaching the playoffs, however they're surely not satisfied with how the second stage progressed for them. They lost to both Florida Mayhem and the Boston Uprising last week and that losing streak continued yesterday with their close 2-3 loss to the Philadelphia Fusion. They were looking to play spoiled and ultimately failed even though they displayed great improvement and adaptation during the course of the series.

As for New York, well, things got a bit hairy a couple of days ago. Everyone thought that their match against Dallas was supposed to be a walk in the park but it turned out to be quite a fight. No one expected a struggling Dallas squad to pose such an interesting set of problems for the best team in the Overwatch League and it took New York five intense, clutch maps to emerge victorious. While they did come alive (Saebyeolbe especially) on the deciding Ilios, the first four maps were insanely back and forth. While this probably isn't a sign of weakness by any means, it is an interesting match to analyze as they did display a fair number of holes in their game.

We're going with New York on this one as there is no reason to doubt their dominance. That said, the sheer fact that they needed five maps to take down a struggling Dallas Fuel squad raises a big number of questions and doubts. Where they caught of guard by Dallas' adaptation and innovation, their Reaper + Mei strat from 2016, or the fact that Seagull played D.Va far better than anyone expected - we do not know, but they shouldn't underestimate the Valiant as much as they did Dallas.